I recently heard someone describe a voice message as a more intimate version of a text message, because receiving one from someone feels like “they’re whispering in your ear.” For me, they’re somewhere on the intimacy gradient between text and conversation. Hearing a voice, the cadence of a sentence, the various shades of sound, adds the familiar depth and dimensionality of an in-person exchange. But voice messages allow time for contemplation, listening back, formulating a response. There’s a different durational quality to it—a conversation, suspended.
For further suspension (and I guess, preservation) I thought it might be fun to add email to the mix. How the newsletter works is, I record a voice message detailing whatever I’ve been thinking about or preoccupied with. I send it around to the emails on the list. You respond with an MP3 of voice message of your own, and I stitch together the responses and send it back around.
You don’t have to participate, you can just listen. Or you can send a response and ask that I not make it public, that’s fine, too. It’s an experiment among friends. Right now the process is a little clunky, but hopefully it will evolve.
In the meantime, tell your friends!