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2005-04-22 12:51
A Moment of Silence for Vanishing Sounds
The lifespan of sounds seems to be shrinking, Tom Valentino, president of Valentino Production Music, the nation's oldest sound-effects warehouse, said: "We sent our engineers to Ft. Bragg 25 years ago to record military tanks. All those sounds are now totally historical."

So are old pinball machines, car horns and pull-chain toilet flushes. Even the scratch of chalk on a blackboard is being exiled by the squeak of markers on dry-erase boards.

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For most of history, the soundscape rarely changed.

"From the birth of man until the late 1800s, the predominant sounds human beings heard arose from nature," said Rex Julian Beaber, a psychologist and attorney in Century City.

The Industrial Revolution upended all that, unleashing a cacophony of man-made noise. Today, another sonic revolution is underway. Although many observers fear the planet is about to become louder (check your local Dolby surround-sound cinema), Beaber foresees a wave of silence. Modern technologies are turning down the volume of our mechanized society, he says.

So far, the differences are subtle, such as the click of a TV channel knob being muzzled by electronic remote controls. But eventually, when the roar of the internal combustion engine is muted by the whir of electric or fuel-cell motors, "we will return to the world from which we came, one in which the big sounds we hear are from nature," Beaber predicts.

Such a transformation would be stunning, said Diana Deutsch, a UC San Diego psychology professor who studies the perception of sound.

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2005-04-22 12:51