Long Gone Sounds

There's an episode of I Love Lucy in which Lucy and Ethel try to identify a mystery sound on a radio game show. After wreaking havoc all over Lucy's apartment, they discover it's the sound a refrigerator makes just after being unplugged.

(That's all I remember. I suppose refrigerators did at one time make a sound like that; today's do more of a "chugging" sound, as I recall, followed by a drip, perhaps; at least my old one did, but that was a 30-year-old refrigerator.)

The point, of course, is that sounds - unlike movie plots and hairstyles - go away forever. You can hear recordings of some of these, but you can't really know them. Just like hearing an old recording of an American Indian speaking a now-extinct language - it captures the voice and grammar, but it doesn't capture all the bits and pieces (and relationships among them) that the language once reflected and knit together.

This a short list but a long(ish) post. Just scroll and stop where you care to.

1
The sound a phonograph needle makes...

... as it comes to rest on a vinyl record and before it starts playing the first song.

From freesound.org:

 

2
The sound of a TV test pattern...

... at the end of a "broadcast day" after the National Anthem has been played.

There is no such thing as an end to a broadcast day anymore. I wish there were. There was a special sort of quality to the "late late late show"[1] when you knew that afterwards the world was sleeping while your TV exhaled one, long, uninterrupted beep, waiting for the weather man and news man to return with information you needed for the next day.

I remember many times as a young teen staying up to hear the National Anthem and watch the station switch over to a test pattern. There were only a few hours before the broadcast day began again, and I also remember thinking how unfortunate that the sound and night couldn't continue longer; it was a quiet, reflective moment in which all bad things were for a while suspended.

(BTW, what’s with starting a new move while another’s ending? Or running programming notices that bounce and occupy 1/3 of the screen? Or time condensing so you can squeeze an old 25-minute show into 20 or 15? Where’s the tipping point? Probably varies by demographic; I reached mine a long time ago. No one makes any money off me with television.)

 

3
The sounds of static between radio stations...

... which is actually residue from the Big Bang - imagine that. In the age of iPods and digital tuning, this experience is mostly lost. There is, however, a unique delight in adjusting a tuning knob just-so, and rotating a radio or antenna, until you can listen to a faraway voice that bounced around the ionosphere hundreds or thousands of miles before reaching your ears.

From freesound.org:

 

4
Department store bong.

From freesound.org >

This is not as deep and rich as the one I remember, but some did sound this way. If you watch enough old TV shows from that era - Burns and Allen, Benny, Hazel, etc (when TV was transitioning from black and white to color) - you'll hear it frequently in department store settings.

 

5
The sound of an antique popup toaster.

Our old toaster when I was a kid was old even then. Like a modern popup toaster, it was on a timer, but it pushed up and sort of wheezed when the toast was done, finishing with a motorized "winding down" sound, much like a child's wind-up race car that stores energy as you roll it backwards across the floor, then moves forward on its own for a few yards.

(That toaster startled my childhood friends, including Scott Cadwallader and Jerry Beers, who didn't expect a toaster to sound like that.)

As I recall, it also had Bakelite knobs and a cloth-covered cord. It looked something like the picture accompanying this post. It even had that same design on the side.

 

6
Communion cups being placed in pew holders.

A common monthly sound in a Baptist church 40 years ago was hundreds of little glass communion cups being placed in wooden pew holders (often plastic lined) after the grape juice was consumed. Most churches have gone to plastic disposable cups, which are light and don't produce the same effect.

I remember my mom and dad being part of the crew that collected the glass cups, took them downstairs to be washed in the church kitchen at Bethel Baptist Church (which was at that time at 737 E 26th Street Erie PA). Many church couples were down there helping. They all laughed and smiled and seemed to be having such a good time. I believe they were all deacons and deaconesses. (In a Baptist church, a deaconess is a deacon's wife.)

That was the only time I saw what we actually consumed during a communion service, as these couples were also disposing of unused "bread" and "wine." It was Welch's grape juice and Manischewitz unsalted matzos (which is unleavened bread and similar to a saltine in texture but different in taste and appearance).

There is, BTW, no reverence for the elements of the host after a Baptist communion service. I now know that this is offensive to some Christians. However, in fundamentalist tradition, they are only symbols. During the service they are treated reverently, but afterward they are again just grape juice and matzo.

Unless there are still churches using glass cups or someone by chance recorded it, that sound is long gone.

 

7
Turning bible pages.

In most of those Baptist churches, many times during the service the pastor will say something to the effect of "turn with me in your bibles to..." and then give a bible reference.

There is a unique sound of a hundred or so people flipping through thousands of pages; not ordinary pulpy pages like you find in a hymnal or paperback novel, but thin, strong, translucent pages; and when the rustling stops, those hundred or so bibles are open to a page marked with different colored notations from ancient ballpoint pens, each noting some little thing of some significance said at some time by some pastor, or in a bible study, or during a moment of reflection during personal devotions.

Good Baptists keep their bibles for a very long time, sometimes a lifetime[2], and they become journals of a sort.

 

[1]
In Erie, we used to stay up late and watch "The Late Great Horror Show" hosted by local WJET radio personality Jim Cook (who I think now is a Clear Channel VP). They showed old classic and corny horror movies. Eventually that was replaced with the nationally syndicated Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, who was much more fun to look at but grew tiresome quickly.

[2]
It's common in the Baptist tradition when someone dies to give their Bible to a loved one who will treasure it as much as the owner did. My brother Tom has Dad's; I can think of no better home for it.

I remember being told from the pulpit at Bethel Baptist Church (which was at that time at 737 E. 26th Street in Erie, PA) that you won't hear bible pages turning in a Lutheran or Episcopal or Catholic church like you do in a bible-believing church. (I don't know that from personal experience). There are so many layers to a comment like that, I can't unpack them in a footnote, but the unstated assumption was that the bible is our sole authority (sola scriptura), and others who didn't recognize that - as well as carry it and read it and meditate on it - were practicing an inadequate Christianity, and probably were not Christians at all.

Of course, until most believers were literate and there was a bible published in a common language and bibles became affordable, Christians did what all humans have done for hundreds of thousands of years - they told stories and collected around themselves symbols of important elements of those stories. For Christians this included rites, iconography, and repeated payers. We usually associate such things with the Catholic church, but evangelicals must remember that until the Reformation, that was our church as well, and it wasn't that long ago. We share the same religious DNA. We are made of the same "Jesus stuff" (with apologies to Carl Sagan), and we practice forms of the same rites and repetition we condemn.

(Where is the Antichrist in the bible? Or prayer of salvation? Where does the bible say they drank grape juice at the Last Supper? We all do some things because we always did them that way and we don't want to question them. Let's get past that before we start beating up on each other. As Gary Locke, my 6th grade teacher at Vernondale Elementary School, paraphrased: "take the log out of your own eye before you go pickin' splinters out of other people's," and he was Jewish, and a good man, and a good teacher.)

The Catholic Church retained the statues and practices and prayers, and the doctrines that collected around them. Protestants didn't. And that's too bad. I kind of like them myself.

BTW, no Catholic that knows better ascribes any saving value to icons and rites and prayers in and of themselves, and there has been a new desire in the last couple generations to encourage Catholic laity to not only read the bible, but engage it in the same way evangelicals do. (More on that later; this is already long; if you staid with me to the end, thank you.)

Started: 2012-07-31