voicenote

on tiny intimacies

This summer, while I take a bit of a long-overdue break, I’m sharing pieces from the savour archive paywall free. A lot has changed since I wrote this ode to voicenotes a couple years ago, but voicenotes remain a crucial part of my daily existence. One of the things I didn’t expect when I became a mother was an increase in the time I’d spend on WhatsApp: organising playdates, receiving and sending advice, forming skeins of connection to other friends who perhaps I’d not seen in a while or perhaps I’d see very regularly. These days, our voicenotes are peppered with our children’s voices, or interrupted by the things we say to them.

I’d been feeling its absence for a couple of days. The WhatsApp group that has bound the three of us together - the women I have grown up with, the best girls - had fallen silent. It happens sometimes: there’s an unspoken rule that we don’t bother the group when one of its members is on holiday; there have been babies and new jobs and illnesses that have accommodated quietude. But a week is a rare gulf. I checked in, told them I missed them. The best of real-time updates appeared in response: “...is recording”.

Voicenotes - the short recordings that we can fling across the ether into one another’s palms - have been a feature on WhatsApp for nearly a decade, but I think I only started using them in the past couple of years. Still, they remain a bit of a novelty, or a treat. Perhaps if I were younger they would be less extraordinary; the other day I saw a woman in her mid-thirties post that her four-year-old had learned how to send her them. A sweet delivery from a generation who will never know the tether of a landline phone. 

In my inbox, voicenotes - VNs, in rapid parlance - serve different uses. There are the efficient, practical ones: it is easier to talk somebody through the making a lasagne, or the basics of the publishing industry, than it is to type it out - for the person doling out the advice, at least. 

Then there are those that serve to capture something typing simply can’t, such as the squeal of excitement when someone shares good news, or the sound of a musician playing a friend’s favourite song at a gig they can’t make. We used to hold up our Nokia 2210s, use precious credit on sharing a bar or two from a scuzzy indie gig. Now we can record and upload, instantly, for the recipient to play when it suits them. Something nostalgic and futuristic, all at once.

My favourites are those borne of both: the need to say more than one can type, and the desire to capture something words can’t. The four-minuters, that capture a good story or a tantalising bit of gossip, that explain the thorny ins-and-outs of a weekend away or a problem at work. Sometimes it’s deeper than that, sometimes it’s just feelings. To transfer the listlessness of summer, or the complexity of professional jealousy in words is to edit oneself; but tapping record with only a bar to measure our volume means we can speak without that varnish. It’s a vulnerable place to be, that’s why it means so much.

I wonder if more voicenote recordings were sent during the pandemic. I think of that time as my voicenote debut, when I would hold full conversations through them, jotting down notes of what was said in the longer ones to come back to in my reply. From our isolated little bubbles they let us into the noise of other people’s lives - the birdsong or the flump of a sheet being folded, the call out of another’s partner or flatmate from another part of the house. Still, I love these glimmers. I have a running joke with one friend that I only send voicenotes while a tap is on. It’s because we often send them at night, when I am washing up or running a bath. We make our own schedules this way. 

Refuseniks will ask why we don’t just call each other, something that seems more formal and intimate with each passing year. I increasingly love a phone call, but it’s not the same as a voicenote. The latter removes the need to converse: one person speaks of what they wish, and then it is the other’s turn. I find I listen better to a voicenote than I would somebody on the phone; you can catch their thoughts as they are forming, you do not need to wait for the delicacy of an invitation. I like to return to them, to go over, sometimes, what was said. A good joke, an honest admission. 

And voicenotes do have their own etiquette - of which I am deeply fond. The little explanation of why we are sending one, perhaps a self-reprimand for waffling, a shocked pronouncement of how long we’ve managed to go on for. It is acceptable to reply in text while listening, to offer a two-tone, instant response to the declarations held within. It makes it into a dance or a play. I am listening, and I am responding, look at how taken with you I am.

That morning, when a voicenote came in after a week of silence and scattered, short messages, it felt like nothing had gone away. I heard the voice I’d known since adolescence, painted with the weariness of womanhood. I heard her, and I knew how she was feeling. I heard her tell us she loved us with more potency than a text message ever could. And I heard the shower running, and the rush of her day, and it was enough, it was plenty. It would tide us over. 

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