Skype, the telecommunications app, launched in 2003, the same year as MySpace and the ill-fated Space Shuttle Columbia.
Skype was a progenitor of our late-pandemic, Zoom-mediated lives. And now, after 22 years, and almost a decade and a half following its acquisition by Microsoft, Skype has been shut down, as of May 5.
Between cellphones and Facetime and Slack huddles and all manner of conference-call apps, we take instant realtime video communication these days as a given, but Skype originated (voice-only initially) at a time when such things were expensive, all the more so when connecting people internationally.
For just under a decade, I taught a course about sound to art school students, the majority of whom were from other countries (e.g., Sweden, Korea, China, Spain, and Saudi Arabia). I started doing so in 2012, a year after Microsoft bought Skype. A core part of the assigned homework was maintaining a “sound journal,” in which students wrote several times a week, detailing an observation they made about one sound or another.
Certain topics revealed themselves as common to these journals as the years of my teaching went by: the issues of noise in a city, the comforting purr of a house cat, the way the chatter in cafes somehow provided the perfect backdrop for doing homework. The everyday utility of Apple’s AirPods became a nearly universal subject in these sound journal shortly after their debut in 2016.
And at least one student a semester would inevitably write a short essay affectionately describing the sounds that Skype made, in particular when it opened and when its bubbly melody announced an incoming call. These Skype-specific sounds meant that the student would soon be talking to family or friends back home. Often these sound journal entries would describe how the student didn’t even recognize a persistent low-level homesickness until Skype announced itself — and then the sense of longing and the awareness of loneliness kicked in.
There was a lot packed into those little Skype noises, and the app became a useful tool for discussing the broader topic of the course, that being the role of sound in the media landscape, and the more focused matter of what’s come to be termed “sonic branding.” Some of the best ways to introduce subjects in class, I learned, was to let them happen naturally. So for the most part, I didn’t introduce Skype each semester. I just waited for it to come up — for it to, in effect, ring — and then we would collectively dive into its emotional and cultural meaning.