tl;dr: If you really want to capture a moment with someone you love, stop taking pictures and hit record on the voice memos app instead.

We are currently drowning in JPEGs. Every interesting moment results in a bunch of photos getting taken with our phones, synced to the cloud, and largely forgotten.

Don’t get me wrong, photos are great for remembering what someone or something looked like at a specific point in time. But after a while, scrolling through them feels a bit hollow. You see the face, but you don’t necessarily feel the presence.

If you want to capture your personal experience of someone you love, make candid audio recording with your phone.

Story time

🔈 I don’t know if it’s my proclivity for audio or what, but I had an intuition to start making random recordings of conversations with my grandma a couple of years before she passed away. Nothing formal, just her rambling about growing up, WW2 experiences, or even just her making random comments. I’d just set my phone on the table and let it run for twenty minutes.

Now that she’s gone, I have many photos of her. But the things I treasure most are those crappy little .ogg files.

When I look at a photo of her, I remember that she existed. When I play one of those recordings, it’s like she’s back in the room with me. The effect is… visceral. It captures the cadence of her speech, the specific way she chuckled at her own stories, the little pauses. It transports you instantly back to that moment in a way a silent image never could.

Audio is infinitely more intimate than video or photography. It forces you to focus on the personality and how the person “feels” rather than the appearance. You think you will remember exactly what your dad sounds like when he’s explaining something, or the pitch of your kid’s laugh right now, but human acoustic memory is notoriously bad. You won’t remember unless hearing it again.

So, start building an audio album. It doesn’t have to be high production value; phone microphones are amazingly good these days. Next time you’re sitting around with your parents, record a few minutes of the banter. Ask an older relative to tell you a story you’ve heard a dozens times and get it on tape. You can thank me later.

A necessary warning

Treat these recordings like sensitive documents. The technology for AI voice cloning and deep fakes is accelerating at a terrifying pace. It already only takes a minute or two of clear audio to create a passable clone of someone’s voice. For obvious reasons, you do not want your loved one’s voice data floating around in easily accessible cloud storage or public social media platforms where it could eventually be scraped and weaponized for scams.

Keep these files offline. Put them on an external hard drive, maybe even encrypt them. Keep them private. They are for you, not for the internet. Here is the text formatted with minimal Markdown for easy copying and pasting.