A Brief Audio History
A conversation with Mac, in the comments section of a recent post, caused me to dig through the archives a bit and look into the history of ambient audioboos I’ve released over the last twelve months or so.
Honestly, the little audio-scrapbook it’s become has me wishing I’d been doing them for years – why do we so carefully record the visual aspects of things we find exotic or worth remembering, but forget to record our audio impressions, which can be just as distinctive?
Care to follow me into a bit of time travel? Find them, in reverse chronological order, here.
True, I’ve always wondered why so little attention is paid to sounds as a way to remember. I never had a videocamera and back when my whole family met here for Christmas day I recorded at least two or three hours of us talking and laughing and all every year. Microphones are so very unobstrusive, compared to cameras, that everybody forgot about them within minutes and was just themselves. We look at pictures of our parents, who passed away many years ago, and not much stirs inside of any of us, but when we hear their voices, with no accompanying pictures to make them less real, it’s like having them here again. As OTR fans very well know, sounds and voices alone can often do a lot more for the mind than any picture, moving or still alike.
Ahh, yes, that’s a perfect use.
Not only is it great for the generation who were there, but also those that will follow – I doubt my children will ever quite believe what the Christmases of my youth were like, if only because the world itself has changed so much.
Very true and very sad. It wasn’t just that my family was different (now we all have Christmas separately). Even the thing children cared the most about (presents) was different. If you listen to those ols recordings, you can hear my nephews and nieces literally scream with excitement, as they feverishly tear apart the wrappings and discover what their gifts are, running out of breath and on the verge of collapse. That was less than 30 years ago. Last Christmas I saw my grand-niece open her presents: she was so uninterested that she didn’t even open half of them… and all the while the people in the house just tried to avoid each other. Everybody has too much material stuff to own and not enough love stuff to give. For a while Christmas was about getting together, then it turned into a just-get-the-material-gift celebration, and now it’s not even that. I listen to those tapes and I hear the difference, I hear us laughing, and talking, and joking, and playing, and sharing love and fun, it’s not just my memory playing tricks: it is there, it is a fact. How sad.