Sound sensations

Why do some sounds endure to jolt the memory and take us back to a specific moment in time, like Proust’s taste sensations, while others fade away? The chunter-chunter-chunt of a steam train, for instance, is instantly recognisable even for those too young ever to have been on a ‘real’ steam journey. When they hear it they’re not being taken back to that excitement about travel before motorways and jet planes, before we became so restless for change and the sensation of moving on that we demanded much faster but far less interesting modes of transport. No, for those born post-1960, steam means something else, but what’s so odd is that the steam train is just as evocative to them as if they had been there when the Mallard hit 100 mph. It’s not the thing itself they’re remembering but an imagined prelapsarian idyll, pre-pill, pre-pizza, pre-M25.

In Saturday’s The Archive Hour on Radio Four, Julian Baggini (and his producer Tim Dee) took us on a fascinating philosophical journey through the audio past.