Posted by There was a period of time a few years ago when every morning, I would do the school run then afterwards walk to Bikram Yoga, then either hop on the tube to go give a lecture or, I would walk home and sit in my sunny office and write.
Quite often on those afternoons at my desk, I would listen to davidji on SoundCloud. I don’t really remember how I came to be on SoundCloud, but I suspect that I signed up to SoundCloud just so I could listen to him, or even if it was for someone else, I eventually just ended up listening to him. For me SoundCloud is synonymous with davidji.
It is interesting and I am starting to think, really useful, how our mind compresses our memories.
When I look back at that period in time, every single day I am in my little office which opened up onto the garden and the sun is shining through and I am listening to his meditations and writing lovely blogs or prepping lecturing materials and feeling thoroughly happy. Of course, it wasn’t like that at all. In real life, my mum was very poorly and on her journey home. The primary school rang me daily after they failed miserably in their duty, and then the hospital would ring too which is always really, really worrying. In fact even now years later, my heart still sinks when my phone rings. Some days though, more prosaically, it was just cold and rainy. I was anything but calm, as there was a lot on my mind and probably why I was needing his meditation tracks in the first place. But, I love that in my memories now, it is always sunny, always warm and always, davidji meditation loving vibes.
I even recorded a blog or two which I had written, namely My name is Ruth and The Ghosts of AI and uploaded them up onto SoundCloud. Though strictly speaking that was not a day alone in the office, as you can hear my kids playing in the background. I was going through a phase of exploring different ways of blogging and doing it whenever I could. I also tried vlogging over on YouTube and had a lot of fun.
I don’t know when these creative moments and my SoundCloud afternoons ended.
Perhaps it was during the pandemic when we were all at home and I created my course on Udemy and was busy making videos just for that. Then, we moved house and I didn’t have a sunny office anymore, and I’d almost forgotten about my SoundCloud meditation afternoons, until just recently when I began making talking heads once more and putting them up on YouTube channel which has been having a snooze these last five years.
I’d sworn off making talking heads because they were hard to do without scripting and editing and stuff, and then setting up the big soft box lights and putting them away was a lot of work. I was also hell-bent on getting my lectures as short as possible without rambling and lots of ums and ahhs. But after five years of having my course online and seeing that it doesn’t have to be so rigid, I have relaxed a bit and oh magic of magics, I also got a new phone and a new sunny spot.
Recently, I pushed my desk into the bay window so that I can sit in the sun and write again on those lovely afternoons which are just currently a promise on the wind, as the days grow lighter and warmer and it reminded me of SoundCloud and meditating and writing in the sunshine and then talking to myself into my phone.
So, I bought a ring light, which to be honest, isn’t very bright. But amazingly, I discovered that I didn’t need it with my new Pixel 9, as it does all the magic lighting itself which is super handy. I plugged in my panda lapel microphone having already experimented in the past with wireless stuff with underwhelming results and I was ready. However, with a usb-c adaptor to my panda lapel microphone on the new phone, there was a lot of feedback. After much trial and error, I discovered that if the microphone cable sits anywhere near the ring light, it generates a lot of a feedback which can be heard on the recordings, even – get this – when the light is switched off and unplugged from the wall.
I have done two trailers so far: When women were computers and Demystifying AI, and the buzzing is still there. It’s faint, as I edited out with audacity, but it can still be heard.
So, I’ll be swapping out the ring light just for a stand and letting the Pixel 9 do it’s magic, and now I am ready for more recording and talking heads with false eyelashes (I love my lashes now I can stick them on – that took a lot of practice too). And this whole process of practice and prep reminded me of my SoundCloud audios way back when.
So today, I logged into SoundCloud, and saw that I still have the two audios, and that davidji doesn’t use SoundCloud much now but publishes on Spotify, an app I use a lot. My SoundCloud activity was a big fat zero. I downloaded the two audios and thought I would put some nice pics on top of them and make a movie and upload them to my YouTube channel. The sound quality just isn’t good, rather like some of my first YouTube videos, before I discovered all the things I needed: lighting and microphones with audacity and Camtasia editing software.
At first I thought that I would rerecord them but I don’t want to lose my little precious babies’ voices in the background, having fun, so I think I will just clean them a bit and leave them as they are and put them up anyway. They are part of my past now, a beautiful and sometimes unbearable past, gone but never forgotten, as it is remembered, edited and, sunny in my mind. A concertina of polished sunny SoundCloud afternoons.
I then deleted my SoundCloud account and gave thanks for all those lovely days of yoga and sunny meditation with davidji and writing magic and as the days get longer and warmer, I will record new videos, firstly for my Udemy course on human-computer interaction, which amazingly today has 1,045 students, and then to put up more content on YouTube, because I love making videos.
However, thanks to remembering those sunny afternoons, I have vowed to do my yoga each morning beforehand and walk my two miles so that when I sit at my desk in the sunshine, I am ready to relax and feel happy. Sadly, I won’t be doing it anymore with SoundCloud but, I thank you, SoundCloud, for those beautiful meditative days and magical writing, they were a little moment of love in the sunshine, gone but never forgotten.
