Whistling kettles, birdsong – which fading British sounds would you save?

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/18/whistling-kettles-birdsong-british-sounds

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When I first moved to my seaside home from London, the most noticeable difference wasn't all the fresh air or the lack of dubstep clubs, but, rather, the sounds. No longer kept awake by the thrum of nightbuses, I discovered a strange yet enchanting new night-time noise coming from the beach – a rhythmic symphony of bell-like clattering. The oddly soothing sound – the rigging of boats banging against their metal masts in the wind – is just one of many new noises I now hear; the crunch of footsteps on shingle, the mewling of seagulls, the howling of a small child who shouldn't have had that third ice-cream.

Now we spend all day staring at screens, the sounds we hear most are often predictable. They are the Pavlovian-pings that herald the arrival of a disappointing email from the bank, or a text asking if we have been mis-sold PPI insurance. They are the dulcet tones of the Candy Crush Saga man repeatedly saying "sweet!" until we lose our minds.

Things used to be simpler. Before we became slaves to smartphones, the soundtrack to our days was different: the whistle of a kettle and the clanging of a typewriter, perhaps, or the unmistakable whine of a dial-up modem. These oft-unloved, everyday sounds are near-extinct – but luckily, a sweet project to preserve sounds such as these in an audio archive is currently under way, as part of a £170,000 EU initiative. In September, Swedish museum curator Torsten Nilsson will visit Britain to record sounds we rarely hear today. On Nilsson's personal hitlist is the sound of a person dialing a rotary telephone and "at least 40 different English kettles boiling ready for preparing afternoon tea". Nilsson told a Swedish newspaper: "At first my colleagues called me a nerd, but it is great to be a nerd."

Isn't it though? I love overlooked sounds. I have several recordings of the disembodied female voice in the lift at my old office. "Floor THRREE" she would enunciate in a way that was deeply British and oddly unsettling.

And there are hundreds of us sound nerds out there – Ian Rawes runs the London Sound Survey, a collection of recordings of everything from the subterranean clanging of the Woolwich foot tunnel to dawn in east London. It's a wonderful cacophony of city noise and birds. Birdsong is oft cited as a favourite British sound – my personal favourite is the skylark, which sounds to me, thanks to a misspent, stoned afternoon in my youth on a hot Welsh beach, like amazing stripped-down techno music.

Public transport also makes people misty-eyed. Steam trains, Routemaster buses, the hoot of a Manchester tram and the old bell cords on buses are all great British sounds. As is, of course, the bongs of Big Ben, and the theme tune to the Archers and the soothing otherworldly shipping forecast. Fisher. Dogger. German Bight. And then there are church bells – a lovely British noise, even to the ears of a hardened atheist such as myself.

But it's in the realm of the domestic, to my mind, where the most evocative sounds are to be found. A purring cat. The rhythmic thud of clothes going around and around in a washing machine. I now use as my bedside table a small set of drawers that was part of a modular unit in my childhood home – the height of 1970s chic. One of the drawers makes a musical, whistling, whooshing sound as you open and close it – a noise that today instantly transports me back to my childhood. A cousin used to have a vacuum cleaner that she swore sounded like the opening notes of I Am the One and Only by Chesney Hawkes when switched on. "That made me very happy," she says. Another friend made a pilgrimage to a pub he used to frequent only to discover that the "particularly musical toilet cistern" he remembered was no longer there. "Lost the music," he says, sounding disappointed. I love pub noises – especially the clatter of metal barrels rolling into the cellar.

Listeners to Radio 4's PM programme have recently been sending in their favourite sounds. They are an eclectic mix – but some of the best ones are domestic – the sound of Lego, for example, or a snoring dog. And, like Nilsson, I fear for the survival of some beloved everyday sounds – the rustling of the pages of a broadsheet newspaper, for example (those freesheets today somehow just don't cut it).

What other almost-bygone British sounds do you think Nilsson should be collecting?