Any old house, on any street;
any house where a family lived, where life happened;
deep in the basement, perhaps; isolated: its partner the Tape Recorder long gone, a likely early-casualty of its own mechanical complexity;
buried among the sawdust, the poorly chosen xmas gifts, the (few or many) power tools. The microphone is inevitable, and it persists.
It’s probably not very fancy or sophisticated;
just the most basic object necessary to reliably convert sound-pressure into an electrical signal; two for stereo, if purchased after 196X (got to be realistic, right? life is in stereo?).
An old house without a microphone would be an unthinkable as an old house without photographs. Whatever it is that drives us to take all those pictures also drives us to capture moments of life via the sound that surrounds us, the sound that we swim in, sound that you can’t escape by something as easy as closing your eyes. Like the camera, the microphone is a crucial tool in the ritual process of memory-enhancement and posterity-creation; the very presence of the microphone at certain moments serves to create the discourse of ‘significance’ that we have come to expect at certain moments of life. The microphone is an index of significance, of remembering, and of the desire to remember. To discard or destroy it would be very difficult. And so it persists.
