Love of Listening!
Happy Valentines Day! I am in love with this. It is one of the greatest documentary projects ever created! It is a traveling exhibit which allows you, through the marvels of modern technology, to interview a loved one in a private soundbooth, housed in nothing more perfectly swanky than a converted Airstream trailer. As if my love affair with Airstream wasn't enough. Now it has been combined with my love for documenting regular everyday human existence. StoryCorps allows you to interview anyone you want, an aging relative, a young child, your mother-in-law or best friend.
Love grows with listening. This project allows you to generate your own questions in hopes of invoking a candid insightful moment between you and your chosen loved one. It captures the small beautiful stories which live between everyday people. These stories air regularly on NPR, and so many times I have been touched by the intimate revelations of these interviews. Speak with the World War generation and find yourself being transported back to brightly-lit cherry-pie kitchens with Glen Miller playing on the radio. Hear couples speak of the successful ingredients to a happy marriage. Hear a midlife mother tell her ten-year-old son that she wouldn't change a thing about him. So many varied and beautiful slices of life! Each oral history interview also gets placed in the StoryCorp Archive at the Library of Congress.
I have been in love with sound recording for as long as I have been in love with picture recording. As a young girl I would carry around an old-style Montgomery Ward tape recorder with the plug-in microphone. In my mid-twenties as a film school geek, I often carried my handheld tape recorder around with me, recording bits of this or that. Cassette tape was so much cheaper than Super 8 film!! And I have always been a "Documentarian" at heart. What better way to show someone you love them, than a desire to document their life and to sit down and really, truly listen to their personal story?
posted by poetmama @ 12:50 PM
1 Comments:
thanks for the link-- this project is fantastic! ward had heard of it, but I had not.
I'm especially excited about it as I feel that as a culture, we are losing the ability to tell our personal stories. we write, we make art, music, films, etc... but telling it/saying it (and then hearing it) is something different, I think. and so important to maintain.
several years ago, I bought a small audio recorder at a yard sale. I had so much fun recording different things: my best friend and myself on a road trip, an incredible lecture at a a dance festival (very embarrassing story behind this though) and many many funny messages left on our answering machine over the course of five or so years. I've since misplaced that little recorder but recently found the cassette tapes... so glad I have them! I treasure them just as much as I do all my old photos and video footage. I miss that little recorder.
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