Write a Story in the Form of an Audio Transcript

The Human

Lee: how did you know you were in love with grandpa?

Grandma: I don’t want to talk about your grandfather.

Lee: No, grandma, look, it says here from Mrs. P, it’s for grandparents day, we have to.

Grandma: I said—

Mom (off mic): Mom.

Grandma: What was the question again?

Lee: How did you know you were in love with grandpa?

Grandma: I was in love with him because I was stupid.

Mom (off mic): Mom.

Lee: But how did you know?

Grandma: Because I found him in—because he made me happy.

Lee: How did he make you happy?

Grandma: He took me dancing every weekend.  He was a better dancer than I was, but he never complained when I stepped on his toes.  He always had something nice to say when I put on pretty dresses, which all my girlfriends thought was the sweetest thing.  He used to say all the other men were jealous.  I used to think it was about me, but—

Mom (off mic): Mother, what did I say?

Grandma (off mic): What?  He asked about his grandfather.

Mom (off mic): Lee, what’s the next question?

Lee: what was your wedding day like?

Grandma: it would have been nice if it weren’t for Brian Hoef—

Mom (off mic): Lee, honey, let’s skip the questions about grandpa.

Lee (off mic): But we’re supposed to.  Everyone else is going to talk about their grandpa.

Mom (off mic): I know, honey, but now’s not a good time.  Grandma’s a bit tired, right, mom?

Grandma (off mic): Jesus, Connie, I’m not tired, I’m just mad your father fucked his best man.

Mom (off mic): it was thirty years ago, mom.

Grandma (off mic): and I hope he’s spent the last twenty burning in hell.

Lee (off mic): what does “fucked” mean?

Mom (off mic): and we’re done here.

The AI

TRANSCRIPT: “THE LISTENING ROOM” — Episode 114

HOST: You’re listening to The Listening Room. Today I’m sitting across from a woman who spent thirty-one years as an air traffic controller in a tower that no longer exists. Margaret Voss, thank you for being here.

VOSS: Thank you for having me.

HOST: Let’s start with the tower. Willow Creek Regional. It closed in 2019.

VOSS: It did. Budget cuts, low traffic. They folded the airspace into Rockford’s control.

HOST: What was it like, those last few months, knowing the end was coming?

VOSS: Quiet. Quieter than usual, and it was already a quiet field. Six, seven flights a day sometimes. Crop dusters. A medevac now and then. You’d think that would make the ending easier. It didn’t.

HOST: Why not?

VOSS: Because I knew every voice. That’s the thing people don’t understand about the job. You don’t see the planes most of the time — it’s dark, or they’re too far, or there’s weather. You just have the voice. And after thirty-one years I could tell you who was nervous, who’d had a bad night, who was flying with a kid in the co-pilot seat because I could hear it in how careful they got.

HOST: Was there a last flight?

VOSS: There was. A Cessna, N-something, I don’t say the tail numbers anymore, habit from the job. Young pilot. First solo cross-country, you could hear that too — that particular kind of trying-to-sound-calm.

HOST: Do you remember what you said to him?

VOSS: Her. And I told her what I told every one of them. Cleared to land, runway two-two, wind calm.

HOST: That’s it?

VOSS: That’s it. It’s not poetry. It’s not supposed to be. It’s supposed to be the same four things in the same order every time so that when a person is nine hundred feet up and their hands are shaking, there’s one voice in the world that isn’t.

HOST: Do you miss it?

VOSS: [pause] I miss being the calm thing. I’ve had a hard time finding something else to be that for people.

HOST: You said this was your last flight in the tower — was it also the last time you spoke to anyone that way?

VOSS: No. There was one more.

HOST: Go on.

VOSS: Six weeks ago. My husband, Frank — stroke, middle of the night. I called it in myself. And the dispatcher, young man, could hear I was falling apart. And he just — slowed everything down. Told me exactly what to do, one thing at a time, in the same calm voice, over and over, until the ambulance got there.

HOST: How is Frank?

VOSS: He’s home. He’s ornery. He’s fine.

HOST: So the voice found you.

VOSS: It always does, if you wait for it.

HOST: Margaret Voss. Thank you.

VOSS: Thank you.

The Analysis

I’ll admit…I was unnerved by the AI result in this one. It had more heart than the others, seemed more internally consistent and complex. Not unlike something you’d hear on NPR (and boy I have listened to a LOT of NPR over the years–shout out to the 1A team, Jen White stan for life). While this may, at first, seem a writing strength, I think this is also its flaw: it gravitates to the sort of audio recordings that are in the public domain, the polished, edited versions of humanity. But recordings are unique in their ability to capture messiness.

I’m thinking of all the home videos my parents took and then later compiled after my grandfather died, one in particular when my grandmother turns to her camera-holding son-in-law and demands in a shrill Brooklyn accent, “What are you doing taking pictures of me looking at pictures?” Of my parents recording my school choir concerts, my father handing the camera to my young sister, who spent the whole time zoomed in on my face, and then not telling me before I gave the recording to my choir director like I always did, thinking it would be the usual whole-stage recording (my hands still get sweaty just typing out that retrospective mortification). Of me pressing record on my cassette player to interview my father’s former employer about his life and what my father was like when he was young, not knowing, yet, that he wasn’t actually my grandfather, but a man who loved us all anyway because he saw a boy who needed him and always had room in his heart for more. These are the mistakes and vulnerabilities that are captured when we cannot edit them away. The sorts of things no one would want to share in a training set because they are too raw, too intimate. The sorts of things we have to be brave to share. The recordings I am most grateful for.

Minus the choir concert.