The idea of the private diary is almost as old as literature itself and has epigones like Michel Montaigne.
His
Essays
are indeed essays, but that quality of intimate writing — locked in his tower — begins to unfold like this: daily, reflective, slowly.
"The authentic diary is a diary written exclusively for the use of the one who writes it", says Hans Rudolf Picard in
The diary as a genre between the intimate and the public
.
In this article he affirmed that there was a process with two distinct stages: in the first half of the 19th century, diaries of travelers and famous people (Byron, Constant, Vigny) were published.
Later, when the public got used to reading them, the other diaries were born, those that were already thought and written with the intention of being published.
The diary of Henri Fréderic Amiel - a philosopher and moralist without public recognition, descendant of a Huguenot family and born in Geneva in 1821 - is considered the first of its kind, published in 1890.
If the origin of the newspaper has to do with its eminently written quality, the truth is that its translation towards sound has not been less.
Within the cinephile imagination, it is impossible not to remember the scene of Woody Allen in
Manhattan
recording that wonderful list of all those things that are worth living for.
The Argentine writer Ricardo Piglia, for his part, explained in one of his television programs how the possibility of recording the voice influenced a large part of Argentine literature.
The cases of Rodolfo Walsh and Manuel Puig popularized the use of the tape recorder as a “technical witness”, thus surpassing the famous notebook.
Walsh and Puig would have enjoyed Journify, the daily audio application that emerged just a few months ago and which aims to make work easier for all those who want to keep a diary without wasting too much time: “Keeping a diary can increase your mindfulness, improve your sleep, self-confidence, creativity, IQ and more.
Record a five-minute journal while traveling, preparing, between meetings, or ... eating pancakes.
We are here to
listen
, but not really ”, explains the web, where there are also a series of
podcasts
.
This application allows you to maintain privacy, since all journal entries are encrypted and handled under strict security standards.
If you want, of course, you can share those
audio inputs
with people you trust via WhatsApp, email or another application on your phone, but if you prefer them to be private, no one will be able to hear them.
According to the Journify website,
daily audio can
reduce stress levels, gain confidence, sharpen memory and even help to have "a strong immune system, a higher IQ and a better ability to discern priorities."
It is impossible to scientifically verify all these benefits of Journify (free with five monthly entries and $ 6.99 (5.8 euros) per month if you want to record more than five), but the truth is that there are a few characteristics that the newspaper sound takes from its predecessor - writing - and that are very attractive for transposition in a narrative context, for example, in a
podcast
:
their fragmentation, certain incoherence at the textual level, the reference to a specific life situation, the almost abbreviated information like a blow, its documentary and descriptive quality.
In addition to these qualities, the sound diary —which we can now shape and form thanks to the production and assembly of a
podcast—
allows the soundscape to take center stage, since it is not a mere setting: it has an obvious narrative function.
R. Murray Schafer, father of the concept
soundscape
(soundscape), states in his key work
The soundscape and the tuning of the world
that
“sounds cannot be known in the same way that what is seen can be known”.
Vision is reflective and analytical, while sound is active and generative.
If we think of an aural grammar, the sounds would be the verbs: “(...) everyone knows that you cannot weigh a whisper or count the voices of a choir or measure the laughter of a child,” writes Schaffer.
Some of the
most prominent and interesting
podcasts
in recent years have this kind of
sound journal
at their center.
10 Things That Scare Me
is a
podcast
from WNYC Studios in which people record themselves via voicemail saying ten things that scare them.
The show team then designs the sound that illustrates those fears.
In BBC World Service there is a
podcast
called
Goodbye to all of this
in which the
host
Sophie Townsed tells in the first person and in the present the cancer of her husband and his subsequent death.
He doesn't really speak, he whispers.
It has a minimal production and each episode is a small work of art.
Finally,
My year in Mensa
- from iHeart Radio - is one of the
most famous
podcasts
in the United States this year and its narrator is Jaime Loftus, a comedian who records herself during a weekend that she attends to meet to one of the most dangerous sects in America.
In our country, voice files have been used as aids in narration.
In
V., the sewers of the State
, Álvaro de Cózar used his voice notes as an analogue to the notes in the notebook, while in
València Destroy
or
Solaris,
for example, Eugenio Viñas and Jorge Carrión are accompanied by Ada and Ella, respectively , two algorithmic voice assistants that are releasing information on the topics addressed.
The episode
Los cassettes del exilio
by Radio Ambulante is one of the most moving and in whose narrative core the recording of a voice is located: the journalist Dennis Maxwell explains how one summer afternoon in Santiago de Chile he found a pile of dusty boxes that his brother had stored for many years in a closet, at a friend's house.
When he opened the box, he discovered more than 20 cassettes that his father recorded between 1976 and 1986, when he was in exile.
However, it was not until very recently that we have been able to listen to a naked sound diary, with no more adornment and narrative context than a voice.
It is about
Jadiya Ali,
a translator who lives in a Saharawi refugee camp.
Isabel Cadenas, director of the series and one of the women behind the
narrative non-fiction
podcast
De eso se no se habla
(which has just received a special mention from the Ondas Award jury for her episode They
Ask for You)
, had the idea of doing an episode narrated in the format of a sound diary and he met the perfect person.
Q:
Jadiya, how was Isabel Cadenas' proposal?
What exactly did you ask for?
A:
At the beginning, Isabel told me about her project after finishing our collaboration together in the Province 53 project, and she told me about the possibility of doing an episode with a Saharawi who would like to collaborate and record their day-to-day life.
She always bet on me doing it, but I wanted the protagonist to be someone else;
in the end, we couldn't find someone who was willing to do it and I agreed to do it myself.
When we confirmed that I was going to be the one from the newspaper, Isabel sent me newspapers as an example so that I had a notion of how it was going to be (I already listened to podcasts before, but not so much newspapers).
Then he left me free to choose what to record and when to do it, since the pieces I sent him seemed good or appropriate for the episode.
Majd, author of her own 'daily audio' on Radio Diaries.
Some of the newspapers Isabel sent her belonged to
Radio Diaries
, newspapers told in first person and sound portraits of Peabody Award-winning producer Joe Richman.
In each episode, adolescents, octogenarians, prisoners, prison guards, evangelists, etc. speak… They are extraordinary stories of everyday life.
There was a specific episode, that of Majd Abdulghani, a teenager living in Saudi Arabia, which inspired Khadijah.
Majd wants to be a scientist but her family wants to fix her marriage.
From the age of 19 to 21, Majd has been recounting her life into a microphone, bringing the listener closer to a society where women's voices are rarely heard.
In that 'daily audio' Majd tells everything: how he fights with his brother, how he must cover himself before men, loneliness, the possibility of finding true love.
Another episode that Jadiya loved was the one dedicated to José William Huezo Soriano, whom everyone called Weasel.
Weasel was born in El Salvador and grew up in Los Angeles.
He had a fairly typical American childhood.
But when he was a teenager, he joined a gang and started getting in trouble with the police.
Later, Weasel was deported back to El Salvador.
He was 26 years old and had not been there since he was 5. He had no memories of the country, no close relatives, and barely remembered his Spanish.
Shortly after he was deported, Radio Diaries gave Weasel a tape recorder to document his first year in El Salvador.
Q:
Khadija, when and how much did you record each day?
Did he have indications from Isabel or was it all spontaneous?
A:
He had no indication of Isabel because the pieces I sent him seemed interesting and appropriate for the form of the episode.
As for the time and the number of recordings, I had nothing established, really.
I imagined myself as a listener and that was a guide for me.
If I saw that, as a listener, I would like to hear a certain scene or would inform me of something by listening to that, then I would take out the recorder and record.
Q:
What power do you think the voice and the soundscape have to achieve an episode as immersive as the one you have achieved?
A:
I have always believed that the voice of the narrator has enormous potential and impact on the listener.
It is the magic of the radio, which, without seeing the person, can take you to multiple settings and scenes.
On the other hand, I think that such an episode has been achieved because it is still something new, or it does not focus only on the history of my people, but on mine and on my day-to-day life as a woman.
Q:
Have you listened to the final episode?
What do you think?
A:
Yes, I did hear it, and I promise I didn't really know how people were going to receive it, although the girls assured me that the episode was great and it was already seen in the listeners during the quarantine.
I really liked the final result, although naive of me, I thought that all the pieces that I had recorded would be included (
laughs)
.
One thing that fascinated me was the reaction of the listeners once the episode was released.
It was a rush and the messages they send me no longer tell you.
I was very excited that people enjoyed it so much and that it drew such great conclusions as those that came to me through messages.
That is not talked about
is a
podcast
that puts silence and absences at the center.
As its authors say, it is a
podcast
"halfway between the chronicle, the essay and the documentary."
Probably there, in that middle way, is where the truth and emotion of good stories reside.
Khadija's is so because her joy in narrating the everyday is contagious.
What if we start narrating ourselves?
Perhaps the sound diary, the
daily audio
, is a good option.