Radio review: Recording voices of loved ones

At 17.05 on the afternoon of 18 September 2010, Sebastiane Hegarty made what was to be the last recording of his mother’s voice (she died in April 2011). As he says, the digital tape ‘invented our last moment’; a moment of no great significance, nothing meaningful was said, except that it now marks an ending. She talks to him while looking through her drawers for her purse that she’s mislaid. She mutters about no longer being able to get out to the bank because she can’t walk there.

Hegarty had been recording their conversations since he was seven. Not for any specific purpose usually, but out of habit, inspired by his ‘lifelong fascination with sound and phonography’. Sometimes his mother knew she was being taped; at other times he recorded her voice covertly, capturing those fleeting and unimportant moments in life, the casual comments, throwaway remarks.

On Saturday’s Between the Ears, produced by Chris Ledgard (Radio 3), Hegarty gave us a portrait in sound of his mother as he had known her; not the big moments, but the everyday intimacies of family life. His mother tells stories from her teenage years in Manchester. She chats away while getting ready to go out, aged 80. She asks Sebastiane to shave off the hairs on her chin. The experience of listening to It’s Just Where I Put My Words: A Voice Remembered could have been like leafing through an album of family snapshots, filled with nostalgia and haunting memories, Hegarty giving us the outline shape of his mother’s life. But it was much more than that.

Hegarty reminded us of what the philosopher Roland Barthes had written about photographs in 1980 when thinking of his mother who had died not long before. Barthes doubted that mere images of loved ones could speak to us, could provide any real sense of connection.