The Word We Chose Before
Plays in the dock at the bottom of the page, so it keeps going while you read on.
Lyrics
Your greeting on the answering machine,
"I'm not here, just leave your name."
Ten seconds, close, no room behind it,
enough to make a stranger sound the same.
It sounds like me.
That isn't proof anymore.
Hang up. Call the number you know.
Ask the word we chose before.
My aunt read stories into her phone
the spring before her voice wore thin.
She said yes, and wrote it down.
The same small door that kept her here
is the door that lets a stranger in.
It sounds like me.
That isn't proof anymore.
Hang up. Call the number you know.
Ask the word we chose before.
If you keep a voice, keep it like a letter,
folded in a drawer, and only with a yes.
If a voice calls asking for money in the night,
hang up first.
Trust it less.
Ten seconds, close, no room around.
If anyone can borrow how I sound,
what is it, then,
you'll know me by?
The band
Quiet Hours
A soft, precise mezzo, almost spoken in places, over not much more than a piano. Reflective and careful, fewer words than you would expect, each one deliberate - and it ends on a question rather than a conclusion.
None of these bands are real. Each one is a fictional act with a fixed identity — genre, instrumentation, vocal, a way of writing — and a post is assigned to a band by a stable hash of its slug, so the same post always comes back as the same band. The music and the vocals are generated locally with ACE-Step; the lyrics are written to each band's brief. No musicians, no recordings, no one to credit.
Where the words came from
The lyrics were written from the post Ten Seconds Is Enough To Borrow A Voice.
A short clip of clean audio is now enough to clone a voice with Chatterbox running locally in Docker, which is exactly why the setup, the benefits and the misuse risks deserve to be understood together.
More by Quiet Hours
- Green Light, Empty Room 3:06
- Read The Diff 4:26
- A Smaller Word Than Must 4:16
- Answer Already There 3:38