tapes and time

Sorry - I'm in posting overdrive this morning but, the more I feel my way through it, the more the sense of past, present, and future seems important to me, so just a quick comment about the medium of the audio recording: I *think* that there is something very particular about the way audio material plays with our sense of time.

If you read a letter written by someone in the past, no doubt you do experience a particular kind of connection based on the fact that that person's hands touched this paper, formed these letters, etc. But there is something much more immediate about hearing a voice - if the quality of the recording is good enough, the person could actually be in the room with you, whereas the letter is a relic, something left behind rather than an index of the person's presence. (In fact, we normally write letters because we are *not* physically present in the same space at the same time.) So an audio recording seems to make the past available to us in a very direct way, as if we were allowed to be present in the past for a moment, and it is the fact that it only *seems* to do this that makes the experience of listening to tapes potentially so upsetting.

Actually, as I write this, I'm becoming less and less convinced by what I'm writing. I often keep cards that people have sent me - I had a clear-out a while ago but, even so, they still go back a few years - and going through them can be quite a fraught experience because, in each case, I imagine the sender choosing that particular card for me, looking at the others in the rack, and picking out this one and not any of the others. So maybe the cards give me the sense of being present in the past for a moment too.

In short, I'm trying to work out whether there is something distinctive about the recorded voice in terms of the way it conjures up the past, but it's eluding me for the moment...