Archeophony by Sean Trott
When I was a young boy, my mother showed me how to tune the radio to hear the voices of the dead. The secret, she explained, lay not only in the frequency one landed on but in the precise…
Author: Sean Trott
When I was a young boy, my mother showed me how to tune the radio to hear the voices of the dead. The secret, she explained, lay not only in the frequency one landed on but in the precise…
About ten years ago, I read an article in The New Yorker entitled “A Voice from the Past” about archeologists working to reconstruct early recordings. Something from the article lodged in my brain, especially the belief (held by some) that all sounds ever produced might still be present, “hovering like ghosts,” and that the voices of the dead simply “vibrate” at a different rate. I wrote it down and forgot about it for a while.
Then, sometime last year, I happened upon that note and started thinking about it again. I’d been writing a series of short stories featuring ghosts and other supernatural phenomena all set in the same city, and the notion of ghostly voices vibrating over the radio waves felt fitting. I thought of the first line somewhat spontaneously: “When I was a young boy, my mother showed me how to tune the radio to hear the voices of the dead.” And with that sentence, I could just picture the outline of a narrative context: someone who’s lost their mother and is grieving an earlier period of their life.
The idea appealed to me also as a vehicle for thinking about what these voices of the dead might be speaking about. Where were they and what did they feel? I liked the idea that many of them might be wistful for the material pleasures of life. It also seemed to me that “tuning in” could not simply be a matter of reaching the right frequency, and that realization went along with another—namely, that the narrator is no longer able to hear these voices. When a period of our lives ends, we are left only with memories from that period, or, if we’re lucky, some sort of map that helps us reconstruct those memories—in this case, a red spiral notebook. There’s often something surreal about looking back at one’s notes from years ago: at least in my experience, they often feel both familiar and alien. This sense of recognition too felt fitting to me, given that I first conceived of this idea ten years ago.
SEAN TROTT is an assistant professor of cognitive science at the University of California San Diego. He is interested in the role language plays in shaping and structuring thought. He likes to spend his free time with his wife and daughter and two cats. Find him on Twitter @Sean_Trott.