Listening to Myself
The first few times I heard my voice from my digital recorder, I had the experience everyone has — ‘Do I really sound like that?’ I just can’t accept that I’m really this high-pitched, nasal, Ira Glassy dude. (No offence to Ira Glass, who is by far my favourite radio personality and whose name I invoke solely as sorry stab at self-consolation.) Whatever happened to that sexy baritone that echoes in my head? Once I got past that, listened to myself a few times, other things started to catch my interest.
When I did my research in Adwafo, Ghana, my note-taking procedure theoretically went something like this:
- Take notes throughout the day in a small, pocket-sized notebook.
- At the end of the day, compile the notes into full sentences in a larger notebook in my room.
- Every two weeks, bring my notebooks to the city of Kumase, to type them up.
In reality, the final step was skipped after the first month. I just didn’t have that kind of time to devote to redundancy, no matter how useful it might turn out to be.
My nightly writing was a serious burden. It always took at least an hour, and usually took closer to and hour and a half or two. Electricity was unreliable, and I regularly had to write by kerosene light. At some point, I started thinking about how much easier it would be if I could just speak my notes, rather than write them. Thus, the digital voice recorder.
The previous posting is written from audio notes, and was one of the first times that I got to really hear the difference between my written and spoken voices. Listening to myself… I was hesitant, thoughtful. I wasn’t cocky the way I sometimes am in print. I was also very unsure and my lack of confidence in what I was doing was quite apparent. (This is something I habitually mask in my writing, and which I have to take pains to reveal.)
A lot of this was quite pleasing, if slightly unnerving, to me. I’ve mentioned before that I’ve been made uncomfortable by the masculine, hetero voice I tend to assume in writing. But in listening to myself, I also caught myself doing something somewhat surprising: I lied.
Nothing serious. I just made myself out to be less ignorant and less timid than I really was. This is the sort of thing that I avoid in writing because the process of putting thoughts into ink takes enough time that I’m able to catch myself. But the immediacy and fleeting nature of voice made it very easy for me to lie to myself in real time without noticing.
It will be interesting to see how this affects what I do, or how noticing this affects how I take notes.