{"id":729,"date":"2019-02-26T17:10:15","date_gmt":"2019-02-26T22:10:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/?p=729"},"modified":"2019-02-26T17:10:15","modified_gmt":"2019-02-26T22:10:15","slug":"sonic-memories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/2019\/02\/26\/sonic-memories\/","title":{"rendered":"Sonic Memories"},"content":{"rendered":"

I know this idea of grasping for a sort of immortality in technology all too well, I fear. To avoid a sob story of sorts I’ll skip details, but last year my grandmother died after a surgery. While the initial reaction was likely similar to every death of a grandparent who was far away, what struck me when reading A Resonant Tomb<\/em> was how much it reminded me of my mother as she grieved for the death of hers.<\/p>\n

A few days after my mother came home from handling my grandmother’s affairs, my mother approached me with my grandmother’s cellphone, asking how to pull my grandmother’s voicemail message onto a computer so she could save it. My mother is also an aspiring videographer, and wanted to save my grandmother’s voice so she may use it in later videos.<\/p>\n

What I think is special about this is we now no longer run into the problem of the phonograph’s lackluster recording quality, as a digital audio file is a bit-for-bit exact copy of the speaker’s voice. Archival-quality recording material is no longer needed, as the voice file could be put onto a CD, a flash drive, or maybe even the cloud. But then this raises a question similar to the one Be Right Back<\/em> was asking, is this extended preservation good for you?<\/p>\n

This ability to hear someone as if they were sitting next to you, despite their death years ago is a definite double-edged sword. A person can be memorialized, using their voice to remind those who love them of whatever goodness they left in the world. A musician’s best music can be immortalized and can influence generations beyond merely the time they were alive. But also this constant, true-to-life reminder of loss could also cause someone to become stuck in a more comfortable past, one where they don’t have to face the harsh realities that await them when they take off their headphones.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I know this idea of grasping for a sort of immortality in technology all too well, I fear. To avoid a sob story of sorts I’ll skip details, but last year my grandmother died after a surgery. While the initial reaction was likely similar to every death of a grandparent who was far away, what …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":230,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-729","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-group-c"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paB9Ga-bL","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/729","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/230"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=729"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/729\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":730,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/729\/revisions\/730"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=729"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=729"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=729"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}