a love letter to voice memos
the good, the bad, and the ugly
I have long been a recorder of things, a self-historian, a word hoarder, etc, etc.
on my phone are voice recordings dating back to 2015 of ambient noise around me, including but not limited to the nighttime school bus rides to and from choir competitions, the murmur of voices paired with canned background music in Starbucks, the sound of my own footsteps walking places.
I was a frequent creator of new blogs, a YouTube wannabe, a soundscape imaginer. I put covers of songs from Adventure Time on soundcloud and sent my notes app poetry to anyone who breathed in my direction with enough interest. and of course, I fell in wholeheartedly with the 2015 trend of making a private instagram account, which the world at large called a finsta but for which my friends and I used the misnomer “spam.” (as in, did you see what maddy posted on her spam last night? yeah i did that was lowkey crazy of her doesn’t he follow her spam)
there’s definitely more to say about our spam accounts, which were ostensibly more private and where we often posted long sad captions on a platform even more public to our friends than our tumblr tags, but were in fact way less private since most of us had, like, forty people from our school following our spams and were posting FAR too liberally. something something the desire to be seen and witnessed, the need for an outlet less strictly monitored than our public accounts, something something.
there’s also definitely more to say about my desire to archive, in real time, moments of my life, and my adulthood sadness at not being able to access so many of those archives for various reasons. but this essay was originally intended to be about my relationship with my own voice, recorded. I have been collecting it variously in the last twelve years since I got my first smartphone, and even before that when given my first camcorder. WHAT I WOULDN’T GIVE to see all the insane little videos my friend Christina and I recorded on my tiny blue video camera, though there is nothing I could be given to entice me to release our basement Imagine Dragons covers. it was 2011, let me live. (sorry, Christina’s mom, for all of the times, probably upwards of twenty, that you had to hear us singing Demons into Christina’s fancy microphone setup while one of played lackluster guitar.)
I couldn’t tell you what was the first time I heard my own voice recorded but I could tell you I felt at once repulsed and intrigued; that’s what my voice sounds like? girl, no it doesn’t! no it doesn’t. it does? oh no! let me listen again four hundred times right now trying to recognize myself in it please.
I wonder if people who are growing up and maturing right now as we speak have the same experience of their own recorded voices. my oldest nanny kid, M, likes to make “movies” with her friends (or more often “shows”) in which they make silly jokes and make me hold an iPad for ten hundred years to record them doing it. this is so familiar to me, thinking back to when I would remake episodes of iCarly with my cousin (also named Carly) and her stuffed animals and record it on her mom’s absolutely Paleolithic handheld video camera that stored everything on, like, a cassette tape or a fossil or something.
what’s unfamiliar to me is the act of recording the silly show being just a step in the journey to watching it back. since our stuffed animal remakes of iCarly were recorded on a device that would take many steps and many different other technologies to watch, I am not convinced that we ever did watch them, and I am certainly not convinced that we ever made them with the intention of watching them. M and her friends, on the other hand, do elaborate costume changes and multiple takes and loosely improvised script adjustments and watch each video that has been taken the second that it stops recording. M is eleven and has probably heard her own voice on recording two hundred times by now. I wonder if her experience of her own voice is surprising or old hat.
(this is not a commentary on how kids interact with technology in 2025. i don’t really care that much about that topic.)
as I write this I’m perusing my voice memo library, uploaded and backed up and re-clouded many a time since the original recordings were created in 2015. these are mostly covers of Lorde and Twenty One Pilots songs done in my own bedroom with my older brother’s acoustic guitar. these recordings were, for the most part, just for me. I know at the time that I felt like there was some enormous chasm between what I experienced my voice to be in real time as it came out of me, and what I heard on my tinny little phone microphone. now, ten years later, I have no continual experience of what 16-year-old me’s voice sounds like in real time, because 16-year-old me is archived within 26-year-old me. what I remember my voice to be is what exists in my voice memo library, the experience of time passing having narrowed the chasm between real and recorded until the recorded becomes the only real I can access.
it reminds me of a similar phenomenon, that of our memories rewriting and rewiring themselves over time so the story we first told of an event has morphed over time and, as such, has effected the memory itself. upon hearing this fact for the first time, I thought to myself, “there’s no way that I do that. I have a great memory.” or, more likely, that is what my brain rewrote myself to have thought that I thought to myself the first time I heard this fact many years ago. though in this instance, I supposed the chasm between real and recorded—or remembered—or repeated—is widening constantly, time eroding sedimentary walls.
at the end of the day, the only way I will ever hear myself at 16 talk again is by listening to voice memos. don’t ask why I have the desire to hear myself at 16 talk again, because I think that’s related to some other, broader experience of self-archivism, one that I’m starting to explore and one that is in a broad, one-sided (the one side being me) conversation with this Tavi Gevinson interview. but I’m grateful to have created all of these recordings, to listen back to a starbucks lobby in 2016 with some of my favorite sad indie songs playing very faintly in the background and remember the experience of noticing and admiring and wanting to record what was happening around me.
my experience of my experience—my experience of looking back on my experience—my experience of anticipating looking back on my experience—my present tense nostalgia and at times future nostalgia and often nostalgia for things that are not wholly real for anyone—my experience of my own voice, recorded.