Wednesday, April 17, 2013

A Converted Heart


When I was small enough to hide in cupboards and squirm through the nooks and crannies of the old blue house of my childhood, I would find refuge from my existence as one of nine children in a closet underneath the spiral staircase.  Climbing the rickety shelves of the closet in bare feet, I would always find a cassette tape recorder with a rectangular shaped lo-fi microphone attached to it.  There was a special cradle for the microphone on the recorder and I loved to repeatedly pull the microphone out and then click it back into it's proper place.  But even more than that, I relished flipping on the "power" switch and singing directly into it while pressing my mouth to the grill.  The buzz created by the distortion tickled my lips while an electrified sense of joy ran through my body from sun-kissed head to dingy little toes.

Fast forward twenty-some-odd-years and not much has changed.  When I step into the iso-booth in the studio, I feel the quietude and safety that is my childhood closet under the spiral staircase.  It is me and the microphone.  The vibration.  The electrified joy from head to toe.  My heart nearly leaps from my mouth in the form of sound waves. The waves cause the microphone's diaphragm to vibrate. The microphone captures and transmits my vibrations into an electrical signal. The signal travels a path through a cable to a computer sound card where it is converted from analog into digital code which is then sent to the computer's recording software.  The digital signal is decoded and then sent back to the device's sound card which converts it back to an analog signal, read by your speaker system and emitted as sound waves that are processed by your very own ears.  

Note that this electrical signal started it's journey in my heart.  It IS my heart, traveling through my mouth, changing from one form of energy into another until it reaches you.  Understood in code, then decoded, and recoded. It is my spirit speaking to your spirit. Mine is a converted heart.

6 comments:

  1. Love it!!!! thanks for sharing and I share a similar experience except I an an only child so I didn't have to hide much, unless I wanted to. :)

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  2. Wow, Minday. That was beautiful! That's how I feel when I sing, too. There's nothing like it.

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  3. beautifully written. thank you for sharing.

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  4. You look fantastic! ;) Thanks for sharing.
    If you want to buy wow gold, I can offer my hands.

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  5. It's wonderful to hear your music but to get to know you it so great too! Thanks for sharing.

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