I first heard about Brendan Chilcott and the Museum of Endangered Sounds a few years ago, while I was in high school. WIRED Magazine did a piece on his work in 2012, and the site stuck with me.This project is meant to be a documentation, a record of these noises. These sounds are auditory cues to the memories of our first internet experiences. Sounds can trigger these memories, but the memories disappear without their cues. My goal was to create remembrance of the early days of internet access by allowing the listener to revel in the sounds of the age. Though each person’s memories will be different, the sounds will cue the same style of memory in all the listeners.
I built my narration around the sound effects I had access to. I wanted the piece to have a slightly NPR feel, but with more focus on actively listening to the sounds. I wanted to recreate the experience of trying to go online, because I had seen some of my friends have visceral reactions to the melodic clamor of dial-up, especially when played out of context (on an iPhone, for example.) I also wanted to remind my peers of the beginnings of hand-held entertainment by exposing them to the sound effects and theme musics of popular video games. I started with two Audacity files: one for the dial-up series, and the other for the video-game mash-up. When I first put together the video-game mashup, I realized I would need to shorten many of the audio clips so that they didn’t take over the end result. Audacity allowed me to add a track of labels, so that I could mark which chunks of sound wave I would still use. After cutting, pasting, and re-arranging, I had the base of my project built.
I wrote my narration around the effects I built, and then went out to record it. I recorded simultaneously on Audacity and my phone. I knew that sitting my laptop with Audacity in front of me would get me the best sound quality, but the non-verbal consonants (s, t, p, c/k) would pop on the recording. I didn’t have any way to mute the built-in microphone without also dulling the rest of my narration, so I set my phone on the table by my elbow and recorded from the side. This let me capture my voice with a better sound balance. I made sure to read over my script in chunks, and read each chunk multiple times. I’ve always found that it’s better to work with an excess of files than not enough.
I exported my recordings into a third Audacity file. This let me cut and paste my narrative bits until I had the best copy of each line of text. I merged this file with the sound effects, and began to play. I built an opening sequence out of the movie countdown sound effect, TV snow, and the sound of a VCR rewinding a tape. I used “fade in” and “fade out” extensively to switch between effects and vocals. I kept my effects and narration in separate lines of Audacity, which allowed me to cross-fade with ease. I used “amplify” when necessary to lower background music or raise my narration’s volume, and preserve an overall balance. 
After this rough build, I re-listened to the piece a number of times, adjusting timing as I went. I ended up adding background music to the two large chunks of audio. However, having the sound of a teletype machine and a snippet of Daft Punk’s Technologic emphasized the meaning of my narration, and I was pleased with the final result.

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