I’m always amused when movies set in the present day have a scene with a crowd of press photographers and use the whirring of 35mm film motor drives as a sound effect.
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@mattblaze I just finished a non-fiction book that described someone listening to a "transistor radio" in Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941.
@mattblaze
for a long while the special sound effect to show a computer was responding was the clack-it-clack of a teletype.
and to show a computer was working was to show 9-track IBM tape drives spinning back and forth.
Also, car wheels screeching on the sand.
@mattblaze Or the sounds of teletypes chugging away in a "computer" room.
@mattblaze I have yet to see a cinematic power outage that didn't make a ka-chunk noise.
@mattblaze it definitely feels like the audio equivalent of the floppy drive save icon.
@mattblaze The audio equivalent of a personal bugbear: Hollywood computers. Despite having been ubiquitous in modern life for decades, many filmmakers still feel the urge to mock up fake operating systems (often with black backgrounds and green text in oddly large fonts!) instead of just using whatever OS it would actually be in real life.
The worst part is that it must *cost more* to do this. Why not just ask one of the crew if you could borrow their laptop? 🤷🏻♂️
@mattblaze My fave is a membrane keyboard making clacky Model M sounds, or a modern PC with an ST-225/251 hard disk.
It’s similar to the (until recently almost universally used) sound effect of a dial tone to indicate being hung up on. Except that real phones never actually worked like that. You’d just hear a click and then silence. A dial tone would take 30 seconds or longer to come on the line, if at all.
(This is partly because landline phones used “calling party supervision”, where the connection would stay active for a while until the caller hung up.)
Geiger-counter sound effects for metal detectors.
@mattblaze In the Good Old Days (TM) the calling party could disable the called forever by not hanging up, until one figured out how to get operator intervention (but I nevet achieved even entry level phreak status)
@mattblaze that’s not universally true, in The Netherlands you would (almost) immediately get that “beep-beep-beep” tone if hung up on. Interesting to realise the system was different elsewhere.
(Kids today don’t even know what a dial tone is, let alone how E&M supervision signaling works.)
@mattblaze On-hook, off-hook are from my grandaprents' time, but were still used in the telephony world when I worked on digital telephone switches in the 70s. I wouldn't expect SF and MF signalling to be understood by any but the cognoscenti; but "touch-tone" was well-known)
Fun fact: with the advent of digital switches, it was cheaper for telcos to handle touch-tone dialling than old-fashioned pulse dialling, but they continued to charge extra for the convenience of touch-tone. (I knew how the systems worked, so I just bought a touch-tone phone and plugged it in (egads! unapproved equipment on the phone lines -- that could bring the whole system down!), and of course it "just worked")
@mattblaze Kids these days think DTMF is a Bad Bunny song.
Hell, *I'd* forgotten about dial tones - well, hadn't given them any thought since I last used a landline, 10+years ago. Gone, unlamented, so quickly. 😂
However, I suspect that if I picked up an old style handset my brain would expect to hear a dial tone.
@mattblaze I used to be able to mimic a dial tone with my voice. I could get modems and fax machines (remember those?) to send the Touch Tones, after which I would mimic the negotiation tones and get them to try to communicate with me.
I doubt I could do that anymore. It's been about 35 years since I last did that.
You probably know about @connections but just in case 🙂
@mattblaze and slamming down the "handset" in anger gets really expensive these days
@mattblaze my frickin phone has a motor drive sound effect #facepalm