Audio Postcards
“I’ve been thinking about how lovely and intimate voice memos are,” my friend Tina Antolini, who works on The Times’s flagship podcast The Daily, wrote to me the other day. She had just completed the show’s Mother’s Day episode, which featured collages of voice memos from listeners sharing their moms’ mantras and mottos. Why don’t I send more voice memos? I thought, and promptly made a plan to send Tina a recorded note as soon as I had a minute.
I, too, love voice memos. They’re a little like whispering in someone’s ear, conspiratorial, a podcast for an audience of one. With texts, we struggle to convey irony, humor, gravity or really any tone without the crutches of LOLs and emojis. Is there anything better than a breathless voice memo, sent on the go, relating a funny story, or gossip, or just a heartfelt gesture of attention like “I’m thinking of you”?
When I’m in a voice-memo volley, sending recordings back and forth in real time, I sometimes wonder why we don’t just pick up the phone and talk. But the voice-memo exchange is a different varietal of conversation. It’s asynchronous, so one can partake while doing other things, transmit even when the recipient is sleeping. Each interlocutor gets to unspool their full thought without active-listener “uh-huhs” or supporting interjections. Voice memos are keepsakes, replayable when you want to hear your sister’s unmistakable affect, the way your best friend’s cadence quickens when he’s excited.
I did send Tina a voice memo, and she sent me one back. It had been a while since we’d talked and I’d forgotten her sonorous alto, the way I can tell she’s smiling by the change in her timbre. She reminded me that she’d been pregnant during the pandemic and said that she was grateful to still have voice-memo exchanges from that era that serve as a historical record of her particular concerns in that moment. We sent a couple of memos, then availed ourselves of one of the most convenient benefits of the form: no sign off, no drawn-out goodbye. I love the architecture of traditional conversation, its windup and wind-down and connective tissue, but I also love that I can still get some of th
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