“Flesh Noise”

I had a few hours to spare so I grabbed a table at a hotel downtown where I passed, far too easily, as a participant of the ongoing professional conference. The wifi required a room number and a corresponding name, but my phone worked fine as a modem. Quite suddenly, an hour and a half into my stint, myriad doors opened and the hallway was packed with actual conference participants, marked by shiny lanyards and purpose-built smiles. The chatter was like rainfall, like a rushing stream, like a flock of chatty birds — dense, rapid, and unintelligible. I recorded 45 seconds. This isn’t white noise (too slow) or brown noise (too shrill). It’s flesh noise.

Humorously, both my laptop and my phone recognized the presence of human speech in the recording, and the Voice Memos app registered this with the little speech bubble icon, which signals that a transcription is available. I wondered what marvel might await, as I went to click on the button. Perhaps the processing power of my five-year-old laptop would be able to discern multiple individual streams of conversation from the tightly packed, overlapping speech. I was disappointed if not surprised. The transcription yielded merely “…..” — an extended ellipsis.