Memory is the strangest and most unseizable part of human consciousness. Psychologists, psychiatrists and lawyers are dealing with it for centuries, but in spite of libraries full with research, no-one is able to make any scientific statement about it. We simply don't know how it works. Why do we remember things, why do we forget things? And hów do we remember things?

I'm not a scientist, so I allow myself to state a lot of unscientific things about the human memory. For instance this statement: Memory is a combination of stored sensorial experiences. This means: all our sense-organs take part in the registering of memories. A memory consists of a combination of images, sounds, flavors, smells and feelings. The mixture of this combination makes a memory to be remembered as nice, strange or terrific.

Modern technology contributed a lot to the experience of memories. But technology did so in a rather irregular way. Let's have a look at the development of recording and registering our sensorial perceptions. If we don't think of mirrors and echo-wells, view was the first sensorial perception that could be recorded, or better, registered. Although many historians disclaim his invention, Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre is considered to be the inventor of photography. With his 'daguerreotype' he succeeded in 1839 to make a chemical representation of reality without using pens, pencils or brushes. The age of photography was born.

Since Daguerre's invention, it took nearly 40 years before the next sense-organ could be registered. Mary had a little lamb', was the sentence that Thomas Alva Edison pronounced August 12, 1877. A few seconds later he was the first man to rehear his own voice by playing his phonograph which successfully recorded the sentence. The age of audio was born.

Since Edison, it took another 18 years before another major sense-invention was registered. In 1895, the brothers Auguste and Louis Lumiere invented the Cinematography. But in fact the cinematography wasn't a new sense-recording. In fact it only extended Daguerre's invention by recording images in sequence. With Lumiere the (silent) movie was born.

If we think about the recording of senses, it might sound or look strange that since Thomas Alva Edison no new senses could be recorded. Flavor, smell or feeling: we still have no technology to copy it directly in any chemical or magnetic way. Of course the chemical industry made a huge progress in developing artificial flavors and odeurs, but we still lack a machine able to record and reproduce a special flavor, odeur or feeling. Although we might think that technology is ruling our lives, these technical imperfections show that there are a lot of challenges left to counter.

What does this sequence and imperfection of inventions tell us about the memory? First I must refer to my earlier unscientific statement that memory is a combination of someone's own remembrance of images, sounds, flavors, smells and feelings. But because of the sequence and imperfection of technical inventions, our memory has been predominated. Predominated by image. And France is to blame for it. The inventions of Daguerre and the Lumiere-brothers have predominated our memories with images ever since. To take care of our past, we shoot hundreds of Kodak-films, glue dozens of photo-books and tape thousands of Homevideo's. And although most of today's home-video-equipment include microphones as well, all attention is paid to register our past in IMAGES, not in SOUND.

Although I think that the battle to bring back flavor, smell and feeling back into our individual and collective artificial memory, I don't think this is the case for sound. At least we have radio, at least we have tape-recorders to confront individuals with their sound-past. And if we do so, the reactions often are overwhelming. People who didn't hear the sounds of their youth for half a century, get distracted if they at once hear again the typical sound of the barrow, that daily joined there early childhood-mornings. You can show them pictures of barrows, show them movies of barrows running up and down the small and characteristic bridges of Amsterdam, but only being confronted with the SOUND of the barrows pushes the alarm-bell of their memories. The older you get, the louder it rings. It's a sensation that only can be equaled by SMELLS. The weird sensation of being confronted completely unprepared with the smell of your grandmothers ceiling in 1925. Even if its 75 years ago that you smell it for the last time, and even if this smell never come in your memory ever since, the remembrance to your grandmothers ceiling will be there much clearer than a modern homevideo. Sound-memories can have the same reaction. We don't know that our memory recorded it, until we are confronted with the similar sound years after.

The importance of sound in our memories, made me aware that we continuously are neglecting an important part of this memory. We can take care of archives, we can preserve old pictures and movies, and we can record the stories of each individual. Thus we can make ourselves think of preserving the essential elements of our individual and collective pasts. But if we don't record and preserve the simple sounds of the past as well, we keep away a very important element of our memory. I don't know if there are blinds among us, but if there are, please forgive me my ignorance. Of course you all knew your whole life how important sound is for your memory. In the age of the music-video and the stroboscopic light it's the seers that became blind. For decades we neglected our ears, but at the end of the century we are reinventing them: reinventing them as a crucial part of our memory.

To replace sound in its memorial-position where it belongs, we first have to reconstruct whatever we can. For that reason I started the Museum of Lost Sounds'. Anyone who thinks about his youth, can recollect dozens of typical sounds that disappeared ever since. The typical barrow climbing the bridge is just one of them. I myself can think of the typical sound of the iron dustbins, being emptied in the refuse collector. Not to be compared with today's plastic bags, which, to the benefit of the dustmen, are nearly noiseless. Or the sound of the old two-stroke-engine of my fathers DKW, returning from his job. If you don't record very soon the last Trabant in the former-DDR, this sound that dominates my youth will be lost for ever. But lost sounds can be human as well. Although I won't be able to reconstruct it, the typical sound of my youth's iceman is sticked in my memory. I'll never be able to rehearse his yell, but if you would sang it right now, I for sure will recognize it at once. But unfortunately I never recorded his yell, and my mother told me that the iceman died years ago: so with him his yell was buried for ever.

My Museum of Lost Sounds is still small. Although we have a tough collection of sound recordings at the National Broadcast audio-archives, this is still a beginning. For that reason, I've started some kind of pilot-project. By interviewing dozens of older Amsterdam-born-people, I will try to reconstruct the sound-landscape of Amsterdam in the thirties. The goal of this project is to reconstruct a city-walk of the thirties. If you would have walked from the Central Station to the Dam-square, and further on to the Rijksmuseum, what would have been the sounds that came into your ears? How did the tram-cars chirp in the curves? What melody played the carillon in the Westerkerk (Anne Frank writes about it!). Were today's noisy and irritating pigeons that present in the thirties?

Fortunately, we can reconstruct a lot of sounds with help of other museums. Tram-cars of the thirties are well-preserved in the tram-museum, and on Sundays you can have a ride. But unfortunately the museum-workers keep them too clean, so they hardly make the noise that I'm looking for. And the bells of the carillon of the Westerkerk were remelt into bullets by the Germans in 1943. But a lot of sounds can be reconstructed and recorded for the Museum. But of course a reconstruction remains some kind of imitation. If we simply should record the sounds of our environment on a regular base, my museum could be transferred in a simple homepage, connected with historical and actual soundscapes from all over the world. Also many boring family-reunions will revive: you no longer will have to watch that boring black-and-white wedding-movie of your parents for the umpteenth time. Or turn over these endless pages with old pictures of aunts and uncles you won't be remembered. No, this time we simply shut our eyes and will listen to the sound of mama and daddy's youth. The sound of the thirties.

Marnix Koolhaas