VIDEO SOUND ARCHIVE

My mom with no belly and a little new born sister.

Claudia Ungersbäck

The oldest aural memory I can remember brings me back to the sound of the small planes that took off from the airfield in my hometown. My first visual memory is walking hand in hand with my mother and my grandmother beside the railway tracks of the old train station in Osorno. It was a bright, sunny summer's day and the sky was really blue.

Rodrigo Romero-Flores

I was about 1 year old so this is a very early memory. I was looking out of my cot at night and noticed a fascinating light in the darkness. It was reddish blending with blue. I couldn’t figure out what it was and felt a bit scared but at the same time mesmerised and curious. Slowly I figured out it was a radio and the light was indicator showing the frequency. 

Agnes Prygiel

A signal like a pulsating murmur and a distant dazzling white in the dark.

Benna Gaean Maris

Waking up to the sounds of Buddhist monks at the nearby temple by my grandparents house in Bang Ka, Thailand.

Jonathan Onsuwan Johnson

Apparently these are quite old memories. Memory is too vague in early childhood and clearer in my twenties. Then I joined the visual figurative thinking. 

Oleg Kharch Group

My first visual memory is running around in the back of a van that was sitting at the side of a used car lot. I was around 2 years old. My parents recently had their third child, my younger sister, and they were looking for a bigger mode of transport. The van didn’t have any seats, so I remember running around in what was for me a ‘huge’ space. This is a vivid memory that I have carried my entire life. It has no real significance for me, but it might be the reason I have a very daggy interest in vans. I can even admit that I once owned a very uncool ‘Mini Van Mega Fun’ T-Shirt.

Kailum Graves

My first visual and aural memory is of water. That wet slapping sound when your hands first crash down in the water when splashing around, and the eventual perplonk sound of skipping stones. I was born off Lake Huron. My earliest memories are of lapping water and multi-colored stones along the shore.  

Ecco/Aquí [Nancy Y. Kim]

I grew up in North Adams, Massachusetts in the final years Sprague Electric operated in the mill complex that is now Mass MoCA. I have a hazy memory of a blaring factory whistle that Sprague sounded daily which was loud enough to hear all over town.

Ecco / Aquí [Sarah Crofts]

My first visual memory is from when I was four years old. I rolled off the edge of my bed in the middle of the night and banged my head on the metal bed frame. I remember getting stitches and the nurse making a glove into a makeshift balloon.

Mallory Donen

I'm pretty sure it was riding the mechanical pony at the grocery store. I can picture the pony clearly in my head, and I remember the sound of the penny going into the slot, the soda machine, and the cash registers nearby. 

Charlie Cooper

While sleeping, waking up and then being lifted out of my bed at 5 years old by an apparition.

Bates Belk

Being thrown in the Mokelumne river of Northern California Sierra wilderness by my father teaching me to swim age 3. The blinding, glittering crystal water, the crazy loud bird song, the wild currents, the snow-pack cold. I woke to life. 

Cecelia Chapman

My first visual aural memory is the image of cats. I remember very very small, like 1 year something, I was enchanted by my grandparents' cats, and I can remember how I used to think of them as something so amazing, even if I couldn't, of course, put in these words as a very small child.

Tassia Mila

I can't remember my childhood, but the first sound I felt was the sound of a small trumpet.
The wind blows from back to front,
The paper airplane I threw was floating in the sky.
The paper airplane looked huge and didn't look heavy at all. 

When I was about 5, I woke up in the middle of the night to the sound and sight of the test screen pattern on our new black and white television.

Paul Beaudoin

A song my mother has sung to me.

Arianna Cheung

Me looping Disney’s VHS as a child (in particular Pinocchio, The Lion King and Alice in Wonderland)

Eleonora Roaro 

I don't know if this is a memory, or an inference, but I have a photo of myself holding my infant brother. I could only have been 3-4 years old. I (think I) remember a bright light and the feeling of the chair.

Ben Bogart

I have a pretty terrible memory, so the earliest memory I can think of is from when I was maybe 4 or 5, and looking up at what I thought was a towering lighthouse that was part of an indoor "playground" of sorts in a library. Ironically, when I was 22, I revisited the lighthouse and discovered that what I recalled being a 15 or 20 foot model was in fact shorter than me, perhaps 5 feet at most.

Josh Baerwald

It is certainly linked to plants. I remember my mom wearing a light green dress with Ivy leaves (Hedera Helix) printed on it while walking around the house with her hair in a ponytail.

Lívia Zafanelli

My first visual memory is of my early childhood in my maternal grandparents' backyard. As a curious toddler, I frequented this area, eagerly inhaling the scent of the jasmine flowers that I had picked out near the iron staircase. I also recall tasting their nectars out of their stems. It was the taste of sweet water that I remember so fondly; so vividly.

Zain Al Sharaf Wahbeh

Some time ago I had a contact with a moment of life belonging to my childhood, when you are in the stroller and your mother takes you around. The din of the sun radiating from my face came to me like sound moment. Since that day I have replaced the alarm clock with sunlight.

Before starting my career in Visual Arts, I studied Musicology. I composed a tutored theory Theory of Color - Sound, where I united the two things. I think that each one complements the other, and although from the point of view of physics they are different universes, I think that art can unite them.

Horacio Carrena

Certainly some sights and sounds from my childhood little league baseball fields come to mind... The distant aluminum tink of the bat on ball, or the leather clap of the ball entering a mitt… The grass in the long afternoon shadows of the tessellated chain link… 

Matt Polizzi

Alyona Baranoff

My first aural memory is when I was about six years old and had a tiny styrofoam ball lodged in my ear canal. I remember the amplified sound of the doctor having a look around in my ear and taking it out. The procedure was painless, and to this day, I've yet to know how that got in there.

Natalia Ludmila

My earliest auditory memory was the sea. I lived in Puglia, in southern Italy, and when I think of a perfect sound that binds me to the good times I think of the waves crashing on the shore.

Marco Morelli

Somewhere between Paul Simon’s The Rhythm of the Saints, U2’s Achtung Baby, and Eric Clapton’s Unplugged I’m watching the geometric patterns of our living room carpet whirl as I dance in our house trailer in Fort Nelson, BC.

Jami Reimer

I remember lying awake in my bed at night as a child and seeing little floating spots of color above my bed. I was convinced I was seeing little creatures dancing around in the air.

Ethan Tyrer

I find it difficult to visualise a clear first memory. I have vague, fragmented, ambiguous memories of my early years in Cape Town.

Amelia Johannes

When I was 2 years old, one summer afternoon I was crossing the river in my hometown with my mother and my brother. I remember stopping and just watching them from a contre-plongée angle as they were departing holding their shoes in their hands. They were going against the light and the water seemed to tickle their movement. The image I remember has a very warm yellow filter and the water, as clear as the sky, was gently sparkling in the sunlight.

Cristina Bodnărescu

Sunlight shimmering on ocean water while my orange ice block melted.

Kaye Freeman

When I was baby, in the dark room I saw the light from the gap of the curtains.

Aska Irie

Sound of a train. And the train's passengers' faces through one of windows in my parent's house in Tokyo.

Tomoaki Shibata

Tchaikovsky's Peter and the Wolf conducted by Leonard Bernstein at Lincoln Center for his series, The Young People's Concerts.

Amy Kaps

I really have a bad memory and this is not so clear to me. But the first image that pops into my head is a window in my childhood room that was facing a jasmine plant, which due to its flowers was visited by hummingbirds in the morning.

Solana Lanchares

My first visual memory was of my baptism, I was only a few months old and I remember people sitting in a semicircle, there were several children in party clothes.
Bárbara Paul

I remember being on the snow for the first time and being carried around on a sled. Suddenly the sled turns and I fall with my hands on the snow. I started to laugh but as soon as I saw that there was a tiny speck of blood on my hand I started bawling.

One of my earliest aural memories was trying to make sound out of a Turkish clay whistle with double holes. I was a very little baby that when I realized that I was blowing into the wrong end all along, it felt like the biggest discovery and the most fascinating sound ever on earth. I still remember the sound, smell, taste, and round, cold, and harsh surface of the clay vividly.

Can Bilir

A neighbor was looking after me while my parents were away and they couldn't get our large, cathode ray tube TV to display a proper image; only static appeared. I was sitting on the sofa watching them struggle with the settings, and I clearly recall the sound of the television static.

Alexander Fingrutd

When I was really small my night light in my bedroom was the most important thing in the world, chasing away the monsters and the pitch-black once my parents said goodnight in a deep-orange, Barry Lyndon-ish flickering glow. It was a small clear bulb covered by something reddish and nubbly and seamed-together; I thought it was made of rock or bones or that aliens made it or something. I only figured out a few years ago that it was a sea urchin shell.

Tim Feeney

My first aural memory is hearing Bowie's 'The Man Who Sold The World' on my fathers record player. My first visual memory was watching cartoons in the kitchen of my parents house.

Stephen Roddy