Auditory Alterations

I was on my way back from a walk when I was accosted by the nine-year-old who lives across the road. She wanted to show me the medal she'd won at her Saturday morning gymnastics. I stopped to admire it properly and, as I did so, I pressed the button on my cassette player, to rewind the tape I'd been listening to. 'What's that noise?' she asked.

She'd never heard a tape being rewound. Indeed, she'd never had anything to do with cassettes at all. Very few people do have anything to do with them nowadays. I say that without regret - they are dratted things, although they are the only medium I have for listening to the 'US Foreign Service Institute, Basic Hungarian Course, Part Two', which I bought on E-Bay and, I am hoping, is going to be the thing that at last helps me to make the breakthrough from being peculiarly fluent on the subject of Hungarian real estate (because I once bought a flat there) to being able to discuss other aspects of life, besides square metrage, lift availability, balcony existence and proximity to public transport (plus common costs, possibility of damp, quality of electric wiring and gas heating).

Anyway, my young neighbour's question made me start to wonder which other sounds that we take for granted will soon be disappearing. At present, I suddenly realised, noises are coming and going tremendously quickly. The brisk ring of an old-fashioned telephone has pretty much vanished from most people's houses. That rather nice airy sound with faint pings in it that heralded connection to the Internet in the early days - evoking an image of electronic waves being sent through great distances of wire, across oceans and deserts, in order to sweep you and your modem into the great embrace of the world wide web - is gone already, although occasionally a fax machine gives a faint approximation of it, (but how long until fax machines disappear?) And the newest sound - the squodgy squeak of a Skype message arriving (and its sister, the semi-tune of beeps that heralds an actual Skype call), how long will it last - and what will replace it?

What other sounds have gone, without my even noticing? I'd love to be reminded of any that other people can think of. I know there is one sound I don't want to change ever - it's the ABC radio news theme, which can be heard from about 49 seconds into this.