Making Memories

Recording loved ones creates lasting family keepsakes

BY CAITLIN MANNER

amantha Costanzo Carleton says that she is really glad she wasn’t able to answer the phone a few years ago when her grandmother, Grandma Lily, called to sing “Happy Birthday” to her. “Something told me ‘You’re gonna want to save this.’ So I did. And I was one hundred percent right, because unfortunately she passed away very suddenly not long after that.”

When Carleton and her sister were growing up, they would usually stay with their grandmother in the mornings before school. It was a family tradition that on their birthdays she would be already sitting at the piano as they walked in the door, ready to sing “Happy Birthday” and “Las Mañanitas,” which is the Latin American version of the song. “Having that voicemail, I just pull it up every so often because it’s a little piece of this tradition we had as little kids that she started … that I now keep forever.”

Expecting her first child when she was interviewed for this article, Carleton, who is 30, is thankful that she will also be able to pass this memory down to her daughter in the years to come. “I was really immersed in the Cuban culture growing up [in California], and being out in Massachusetts, as much as I love it, it’s hard to maintain those connections and traditions,” she says. “Every bit that I have, I’m filing away for

[my daughter].”

Carleton’s story illustrates something that more and more people are discovering for themselves: that audio recordings of our loved ones are just as crucial to preserving our memories of them as photographs or any other memento. In fact, they might be even more special.

How sounds evoke memories

Sensory memory is “a mental representation of how environmental events look, sound, feel, smell, and taste.” Vivid details are processed as working memory and then rapidly erode as the brain clears space to process other things. But there is a long-term component of sensory memory that is often left to poets to describe. In literature, it’s called the Proust effect the moment when a taste or smell causes the mind to vividly recall a moment involuntarily.

While our senses of taste and smell (grouped because they are biologically linked) are legendary for evoking powerful moments of recollection, sound is more vague, it would seem. In studies, scientists have discovered that the same part of our brain that’s in charge of processing our sense of hearing is also responsible at least in part for storing emotional memories. Certain sounds, then, can trigger emotions that might’ve been lying dormant, although they’re just softer, in a

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