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. Big changes are taking place in the relationship between past and present. People are staying younger for longer, and yet the young are becoming older sooner, even before they have left their twenties. The pace of change has become so fast that it takes only a decade (much less than a generation) for the sounds that once resonated through our daily lives to become redundant.
Take, for example, the brrrrr-click-ping-whaaaooorrrr sound of a computer establishing a connection to the internet. It’s disappeared already as part of the soundscape, after little more than a decade, as defunct as the steam train became with the advent of those boring old diesels. But despite its rapid demise it’ll probably never be forgotten because of its symbolic significance, registering the moment when we became surfers and Googlers.
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