When my father died a few years ago, I inhereted his massive collection of 35mm slides.From 1952 until the mid 1970s, he, like most people of that era, had recorded the significant events in our lives – trips, birthday parties, weddings, with his Kodak camera, and placed them neatly in a series of metal boxes, all marked.
Kodachrome.
In our era of iPads and digital images, I had no way of viewing (or more significantly as it turns out), showing the slides.
As a family, we always gather at my mother’s house in Miami for Thanksgiving, and I thought it  would be fun to look at the old slides together.  Doing this turned out to be not so easy, as there was no way to see them.  His old projector gave out years ago.  But I was able to find a Kodak Carousel slide projector online and bought it from a store in San Francisco. They shipped it to New York.  It was $90 well spent.
I loaded up the carousels and took them and the projector down to Miami. Â Needless to say, the TSA people were fascinated by the machine (after they tested it for explosives). Â “You don’t hardly see those things anymore” said one of the older ones. The younger employees had no idea what it was.
Last night we had our slide show and I was taken by a few aspects of it.
First, the way the quality of the images holds up after, in some cases, 60 years. Â Like it was yesterday.
But more than anything else, I was taken by the sound.
It was the sound of the slides advancing – the thunk/click each time I hit the ‘forward’ button and a new slide came into view. Â That, with the gentle whirring of the fan cooling the bulb as a kind of white noise background.
There is a scene in one of the first season episodes of Mad Men where Don Draper is pitching Kodak on just this machine. The room is dark and as he talks, his words are also punctuated by that thunk/click as he changes images in the darkened room.
His words are powerful, but so, in a way, is the sound.
When we started our family slide show, my sister wanted to play music from her iPod as background. “There’s no sound”, she said. Â I dissuaded her. Â I could see, however, that the silence of the slides made her children uncomfortable. They have grown up in a world of perpetual sound accompanying visuals. Â In a way, they felt compelled to ‘fill the void’. Â Yet after a dozen slides or so, the room became quiet, the silence punctuated only by the thunk/click of the changing slides – before the ensuing group commentary.
This made me think a lot about sound – the mechanical sounds that I came to associate with the way the world of mechanized media used to work:
The sound of keys strking the paper and platten on a manual typewriter
The sound of the bell and the return carriage on the same
The sound of a click and advance when you took a photograph on a film camera
The sound of an AP or UPI wire copy machine as it thunk thunk thunked breaking news out in text  – with the occasionl bell
The sound of an 8mm movie projector as the physical film wound its way across the sprocket holes
The sound of a needle strking a vinyl record for the first time – or the sound that it made when it got to the end of the record and just kept moving
and so many more
These are sounds that are going to be lost forever.
They are sounds that are unknown to a younger generation that is growing up in a digital world that seems to be both noisier and yet more silent in a way.
Ironically, a few people have tried to recapture those iconic sounds and reproduce them digitally.
There is no reason in the world that my digital Leica M9 should sound like a film camera when I take an exposure, but it does. It is built to do that, and there is something comforting in that.
More than 30 years ago, Alvin Toffler wrote in Future Shock about something he called ‘high tech / high touch’ – that the more advanced a technology got, the more people would long for its opposite – fountain pens in a world of word processors.
Of course, the ‘high tech’ that was around when Toffler wrote the book would be considered museum pieces today. Â (I saw that the hard wire copy from a UPI machine (thunk thunka thunk) announcing Kennedy’s Assasination (1963) sold for $16,000 recently, Â This is a piece of paper that was hardly unique 49 years ago today. There was one in every newsroom in the world.
Maybe iPhoto or Instagram would do well to install a sound effect of a Kodak Carousel every time you changed the pictures.
That ‘announcement’ that something new was coming up – and those few seconds as the machine placed the new slide in its holder and focused it gave us just a moment to reflect on what we had just seen. And maybe that is important.
Copyright Michael Rosenblum 2012
