Audio Memories

One month ago, before departing from home, I grabbed my old ipod-nano. I had planned to updated it, though there was only time to charge it before boarding a 16 hours travel.

During the travel, the time came to actually start it and listen. Songs were somehow old, and summoned on me, not the meaning of any lyrics, music patterns and rhythms, but feelings. Not the ones the artist tried to transmit but the ones I had by the time I used to listen to those musics. The importance was not on the music details, but on images, feeling and thoughts coming back. In sum, my senses were being exercise by all these audio memories.

You are probably familiar with that sort of experience, for example when browsing old pictures, visiting an old place, and so on...

For many years I have never been a fan of keeping records of what I was and what was around me, I would take almost no picture, I would keep no diary, no logs, no external records whatsoever. Specially about pictures it was just troublesome to spend time recording them to actually enjoy the moment... but that has been changing with time.

In that sense, I recognize the first type of memories I have regularly recorded were related to computer logs: Initially my stance was not keep them for security/privacy reasons, but with time I started to trust keeping data and keeping all my emails and logs -- I have very special chat logs, covering an wild range of topics and that for many reasons I would value more than a photo-album.

Keeping records of digital data as always been easier, though then it came the time for me to care about real life records: I guess I can trace back that to a very special person. That's when I wished I could record all my senses and play them back anytime... not only the overvalued sight sense, but all the others: hearing, taste, smell and touch. Actually to be truthful I would even like to remember the others like temperature.

Unfortunately we don't have means to record and play most of those senses, additionally human brain doesn't seems specially tailored to recall some of those senses...

Getting back to the hearing sense, it's recalling capabilities and the easiness to reproduce: I wish now, I had keep logs of all musics I listened to. And I could go back to my player and ask it to play musics from 5 years ago!

As a last personal note:
If not more, I miss the sound of her breathing and heartbeat.