"Yet, when I find something in a transcript that I want to use, I almost always return to the audio first. The recording offers context as the transcript almost never does. In early 2008 I recorded four sisters in the days after the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, and the birds chirping in the garden that January morning belie the somber tone of our meeting. The hum of an air conditioner or a ceiling fan reminds me of the heat during a particular interview; a narrator’s constant sneezing and sniffling speaks to his generosity as he spoke with me despite suffering a terrible allergic attack. The sound, then, brings the conversation alive and reminds me, as a researcher, how fundamentally different this work is than my work in the archive. Above all, though, the meaning, for me, resides in the voice. It is there that I first and finally come to understand the story. The voice hesitates before a painful memory; it spills mirth when remembering childhood mischief. I can hear it smile, or stifle a smile, or signal tears about to come. The voices of my narrators betray their age, breathing heavily, or coughing, or laughing; the physical and emotional strain of the experience is captured on the tape. The voice communicates the texture of life’s experience, sometimes smooth, sometimes coarse. One narrator recounted his life story in a near whisper, and I have since come to understand it as a story thick with regret. Some people nearly shout as they defend their choices, producing evidence (I let the recording run as they leave the room, return with crackling sheaves of paper); many speak slowly, and carefully, cognizant of the recording, the public telling of a private tale. The voice, with its stops and starts, guides the story, embodies it."
Posted on: Mon, 02 Sep 2013 16:58:18 +0000
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