Woman's Attempt To 'Summon' Millennials With Nostalgic Sounds Goes Viral

There are certain sounds that every millennial will recognize and instantly be transported back to their childhoods as soon as they hear them.

Among those is Alex Deam, 34, who shared a video on Instagram and TikTok (@alexdeam) revealing the simple sounds which will instantly send people back to those simpler times. In the viral clip, she included the MSN Messenger notification sound, the Nokia ringtone, the intro to EA Games, the Windows 98 startup sound, and of course the classic noise of dial-up internet. Who could possibly forget that, no matter how hard we try?

Although the last one on that list might bring back a sense of trauma for some (especially those who had siblings who were constantly on the phone), Deam tells Newsweek that she loves how much these sounds can bring back memories from her childhood.

Each sound has a different memory attached to it, whether it's her first cell phone or staying at home to play video games. And it turns out Deam is not alone, as the video has already been viewed over 1.4 million times on Instagram, and 578,200 times on TikTok, as many fellow millennials were also taken back to the 1990s and 2000s by these mere sounds.

Deam said: "There are certain sounds that millennials associate with a certain period of time and the things we experienced back then. But for this video, I tried not to use music to portray that and used the sounds of a different technology we used in our childhood.

"I always make content about things that I personally experienced myself. I remember the Nokia tune being the ringtone of the very first cell phone I owned, which was a present in 2004.

"I also mention EA Games intro sound as I got very sick in the eighth grade, and I spent more than a month at home. In that month, I mastered my score at Need for Speed Underground without feeling guilty for wasting my time. And every time, the EA Games whisper greeted me, so whenever I hear it now, it brings me back to that specific time when I was carefree with no worries."

These sounds might be a glorious reminder of the glory days for many millennials, who are people born between 1991 and 1996, according to Pew Research Center. After that comes generation z, who were born between the years 1997 and 2012.

After sharing her video of the "sounds that summon millennials," Deam expected people to enjoy it, but she wasn't expecting it to gain quite as much attention as it did. She explained that most of the sounds gave people a "warm feeling of nostalgia," apart from one of the noises she selected, which people weren't so happy to recall.

"Lots of people said that the dial-up sound traumatized our generation, and they still can feel a bit of anxiety when hearing it. I also find a pretty common comment saying that people using MSN or ICQ sound as their notification sound for text messages on their phones now," Deam told Newsweek.

Plenty of social media users were happy to be transported back to their childhoods with these iconic sounds, and the TikTok post has already gained more than 1,500 comments. One person wrote: "I didn't realize how deeply ingrained in my psyche the MSN messenger sound is."

Another TikTok user responded: "That Hello Moto just unlocked some wild memories."

And another comment reads: "My whole childhood in a few minutes."

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