What newsroom sounds will vanish next?

(Photo by Kristen Hare)

The Museum of Endangered Sounds started out as a fun side project in 2012, Aaron Leitko reported in The Washington Post that year. The last post on the Museum’s Facebook page came in December of 2012, and there aren’t any recent tweets either, but sounds still live on the museum’s site. And some of them might sound familiar to journalists who’ve been working for awhile.

There are sounds from a teletype, a typewriter, a dot matrix printer, a dial-up modem and a floppy disk drive, among others.

Some of those sounds predated many journalists in newsrooms now, and it made me wonder what sounds could be added in the future? The buzz of a phone on vibrate? Soft clicks of keyboards? Twitter notifications?

I mostly work from home, so the sounds I usually have around me are residential, like the roar of a lawnmower and kids laughing and shouting as they walk home from school. Today my sounds include a 3-year-old, (home “sick” after a slight fever yesterday and a 24-hour daycare ban.) So here’s what my newsroom sounds right now.

What are the sounds in your newsroom, or wherever you do your work? Send me links if you make a recording and I’ll try and include them. (Hat tip to Steffen Konrath for tweeting a link to the Museum’s site.) Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to blow bubbles and munch on fruit snacks.