Sound
memories, mediums, musics
I’ve loved music my whole life.
But piano lessons killed it for a while. Sit here. Read this. Play it exactly like this. Music felt like a language I had to master before I was allowed to speak. So somewhere in middle school I stopped creating and just became a listener instead.
Which honestly wasn’t bad.
In high school I had 150 Pandora stations I’d cycle through till 3am looking for new artists, new songs, new genres. I made playlists and hijacked aux cords like my life depended on it. And for years that’s what my relationship with sound looked like. Engaged, passionate, but a lingering sense that I was orbiting something I couldn’t quite touch.
And then I took 7 years to complete my undergrad. Five different majors, two transfers, a pandemic-induced gap year, and a host of identity crises both personally and creatively. As I wrapped up my sociology degree I had just enough room to take an elective of my choosing.
A class called Sound Studies. Dry title, dry class - changed everything. First assignment: go outside and record. No music. No performing. Just documenting.
Nothing about it felt important at the time, which is probably why it worked.
Somewhere in those lessons sound started becoming a medium instead of a destination. Along with that, making a song for SoundCloud started feeling so specific, maybe even insincere. I didn’t know what to call what I was doing anymore.
Producer felt wrong. Composer felt too avant garde. Engineer felt like a specialized degree.
I was doing parts of all of these roles, but none of them felt relatable or encompassing. Nonetheless, I kept recording things, and kept being confused about it.
Listening back months later. Years later. The hum of a dorm I don’t live in anymore. My dad reading my niece a story. A vocal take where the goofing around in the background is more meaningful than the melody.
Why are these voice memos more meaningful to me than the midwest hip-hop banger I spent three months producing?
They weren’t recordings. They were artifacts.
Soundwaves acting as portals.
Pulling me back into rooms I’d long left.
That's not a music thing. That's a human thing.
Sound doesn’t just document. It teleports. You’re not remembering the moment. You’re back inside it.
Most of the time we type instead.
A voicemail lands differently than a text. Timing, tone, breath, hesitation. Embedded humanity that never survives translation. The fact that Teams still doesn’t have a voice note feature isn’t just a product gap. It’s a symptom of how much we’ve neglected the depth of sound.
That’s what I kept circling back to. So I made a word for it.
Not to define anything. More to avoid having to.
No genres. No job titles. Just sound as a medium.
Something you can do without needing to explain what you’re doing first.
This is the diary of that practice.