Sound Archive of Loss and Love
When my grandmother was dying, I knew I wanted to preserve something of her before it was too late, but I didn’t yet know what or how. In the months and weeks leading up to her passing, I began recording everything: fragments of family conversations, the laughter at a wedding, quiet moments at her bedside. The recordings ranged from three seconds to forty-five minutes. After she passed, I realized that these sounds, which were oftentimes accidental, yet layered and alive, were what I wanted to turn into an archive.
Creating this archive required both emotional sensitivity and practical problem-solving. My first step was to bring order to the chaos: I listened back to every clip, often multiple times, cataloging each one with detailed descriptions to create an inventory. This process was meticulous but grounding; it helped me transform grief into structure. I initially turned to iMovie, which I knew casually, but layering dozens of audio files proved impossible within the limits of iMovie. So I taught myself GarageBand from scratch, experimenting late into the night to understand how to merge, fade, and balance different tracks.
What first began as an act of mourning became a creative and technical challenge. I learned to navigate new software under pressure, think improvisationally, and trust intuition alongside organization. The final archive is less about death than about love—about the resonance of voices that remain even in silence.
Through this project, I discovered that problem-solving can be an act of care, that creativity often emerges from necessity, and that learning on the spot (especially in moments of emotional weight) requires both precision and openness. It taught me how to hold tenderness and technicality together, how to listen carefully, and how to build something lasting out of impermanence.
