Getting clean audio in an ordinary room
Unplug the fridge, stop the ticking clock, shut the windows, and stand the phone on a folded towel about 25 cm from their mouth, slightly off to one side. Record thirty seconds and check it on headphones first. The same rules apply to a MemoriesBox session.
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Before you start
You are not making a record. You are making something a grandchild will play in 2070 on a device that does not exist yet. That sets a low bar for polish and a very high bar for two things: intelligibility and durability. A recording that is slightly dull but clear will be listened to. A recording with a fridge in it will not.
Everything here works in a normal room in a normal house, with equipment you already own, in about ten minutes of preparation. None of it requires you to buy anything.
The steps
1. Kill the fridge
A fridge compressor produces a low continuous hum. You stopped hearing it in your own kitchen years ago; the microphone never will, and no software removes it cleanly without also thinning the voice. Unplug it and put your keys on top of it so you remember to plug it back in. An hour off does nothing to the food.
The same applies to anything with a motor or a fan: a boiler, a laptop, an air conditioner, a fish tank pump. Walk the room and switch off everything that hums. Then stand still for thirty seconds with your eyes shut and listen properly. You will hear three things you did not know were there.
2. Stop the clock
A ticking clock is the most common ruin of an otherwise good family recording, because a tick is short and sharp and sits exactly in the part of the frequency range speech lives in. It cannot be removed afterwards. Take the battery out and put it next to your keys.
Then put both phones on airplane mode. A vibrating phone on a wooden table is louder on a recording than it is in the room, and an incoming call will end the recording entirely.
3. Choose the room by its soft furnishings, not its size
Hard flat surfaces reflect sound, and reverb is one of the very few audio problems that genuinely cannot be undone. Pick the room with the most soft things in it: curtains, a sofa, a rug, a bookcase. A small furnished sitting room beats a large hall every time. Avoid conservatories, bathrooms, stairwells and glass tables. If you are stuck with a hard room, close the curtains, hang a coat over a chair behind them, put a folded blanket on the table, and sit away from the corner.
4. Get the microphone close, and slightly off to one side
Distance is the biggest lever you have, and it is free. Sound falls off sharply with distance while the room's noise does not, so halving the gap between mouth and microphone improves the ratio of voice to room dramatically. Twenty-five centimetres is a good target; a metre away across a table is where most family recordings go wrong. Point it at them but not straight down the barrel of their mouth, so the puffs of air on p and b sounds do not thump the microphone.
5. Put the phone on a folded towel, not in your hand and not on the table
Not in your hand: every movement of your fingers is recorded as a rumble. Not bare on the table: the table conducts every bump and cup straight into the microphone and reflects sound back into it. On a folded towel, cushion or rolled scarf: this isolates and absorbs at the same time.
Find out where the microphone actually is on your phone. On most it is on the bottom edge beside the charging port. Do not cover it, take the case off if the case has a lip over it, and angle that edge towards the person.
6. Record thirty seconds and listen on headphones
The step everybody skips, and the one that saves whole afternoons. Record half a minute of them talking normally and listen back on headphones, not on the phone speaker, which hides everything you are checking for. You are listening for hum, ticking, echo, and distortion when they laugh. If your recorder shows levels, keep the loudest peaks below the top of the meter with headroom to spare. Too quiet can be fixed later. Distortion cannot be fixed at all, by anyone.
While you check, get them talking naturally rather than saying "testing". A person saying "testing" does not sound like a person.
| Ask, for the sound check | Then ask |
|---|---|
| What did you have for breakfast? | Is that what you always have? |
| What can you see out of that window? | Has it changed since you moved in? |
| Who was on the phone earlier? | What did they want? |
| How do you take your tea? | Who taught you that? |
| What is that photograph on the shelf? | Who took it? |
Those five also happen to be a good way into a session, which is covered properly at how to record your parents' life story.
7. Check battery, storage and the record light
Two minutes, and it prevents the worst possible outcome. Charge everything. Check the free space — as rough arithmetic, an hour of compressed audio is around 60 MB and an hour of 24-bit 48 kHz mono WAV is about 520 MB. Check the memory card is in. Confirm the timer is actually moving, because a recorder that is armed but not rolling looks identical to one that is.
Then turn voice activation off. On cheap recorders it is often on by default, labelled VOR or VOX, and it chops the first syllable off every sentence. It ruins more family recordings than any other single setting.
Why a $60 recorder beats a $500 microphone
A studio condenser microphone is a better microphone. For this job, it is worse equipment.
| Handheld recorder, $40–110 | Studio microphone, around $500 | |
|---|---|---|
| What else you need | Two AA batteries and a memory card | An interface, phantom power, a laptop, a stand, two cables |
| Setup time | Under a minute | Fifteen minutes, and something is always missing |
| Room sensitivity | Less. It hears mostly what is near it. | More. It hears the room, the fridge and the neighbour. |
| Failure modes | Batteries, memory card | Driver updates, a laptop asleep, a loose cable, the wrong input selected |
| What it does to the person | Small object on a towel | Equipment. Now they are being interviewed. |
| Runs with no computer | Yes | No |
The sensitivity point is the counterintuitive one. A better microphone is a more sensitive microphone, and in a house with a boiler and a road outside, extra sensitivity is a liability. The handheld recorders sold for lectures and interviews — Zoom, Tascam and Sony all make one — have built-in microphones, a limiter that catches sudden laughter, one large record button, and a battery that outlasts the conversation.
The best recorder is still the phone in your pocket, because it is the one that is there. The reason to own a handheld is that it does not ring, it does not run out of storage because of photographs, and it can be left running for two hours without anyone thinking about it.
File formats that will still open in 2060
The format question is not about quality. It is about whether a decoder still exists.
| Format | Keep it? | Why |
|---|---|---|
| WAV | Yes, the safest | Uncompressed, published in 1991, simple enough that a programmer in 2060 could write a reader in an afternoon |
| FLAC | Yes | Open, lossless, freely documented, reference implementation in the public domain |
| MP3 | Yes, as a copy | Patents expired in 2017. Decoders are everywhere and will not disappear. |
| M4A / AAC | Keep, but not as your only copy | What most phones produce. Fine now, more complicated and more encumbered than WAV. |
| AMR | Convert a copy, keep the original | Old carrier voicemail format. Narrow, low quality, and decoders are getting rarer. |
| DSS, DS2, MSV, DVF, WMA | Convert today | Proprietary dictation and recorder formats. These are the ones that strand people. |
Three rules that matter more than the table:
Keep the original file untouched, for ever. Whatever came off the phone or the recorder is the master. Copy it, never edit it in place.
Never convert a compressed file into another compressed format. Every pass through MP3 or AAC throws information away permanently. If you must convert, convert to WAV or FLAC.
Write a plain text file next to the audio. Who is speaking, when, where, and what it is about. Metadata inside an audio file is stripped by the first cloud service that touches it. A .txt beside it is not, and a human in 2060 can read it without any software at all.
Then three copies: your computer, a drive in the same house, and a cloud account or a copy sent to a relative in a different house. The full routine is at what to do with the recordings afterwards, and what happens to files you have given us is at take everything with you, whenever you like.
What usually goes wrong
A hand over the microphone. Half the level and all the clarity, gone. Know where the microphone is.
Distortion on laughter. Speech was at a good level and then somebody laughed. Leave more headroom than you think you need, and use a recorder with a limiter if you have one.
Voice activation on. The first syllable of every sentence missing. Check this before every session, not just the first.
Two hours of silence. Armed, not rolling. Watch for the timer moving, not for a light.
A phone ringing, or a notification. Airplane mode on every device in the room.
A great recording and no idea who is speaking. Say the date and the names out loud at the start of every file. It takes four seconds and it is the difference between an archive and a folder.
The recording is fine and nobody backed it up. 47% of Americans regret not recording or documenting a conversation with someone who has since died, and 59% have never done it at all (YouGov, June 2022, n=6,090). A recording that exists in one place is only partly recorded.
Questions people ask
What is the best microphone for recording an elderly relative?
For this job, a handheld recorder at $40–110 or the phone already in your pocket, placed on a folded towel about 25 cm away. A $500 studio microphone needs an interface, a laptop and a quiet room, it is more sensitive to the fridge and the road, and it visibly turns a conversation into an interview.
How do I stop background noise in a home recording?
Remove the sources before you record rather than trying to filter them afterwards. Unplug the fridge and anything else with a motor, take the battery out of a ticking clock, shut the windows, put every phone on airplane mode, choose the room with the most soft furnishings, and get the microphone to within about 25 cm.
How close should the microphone be?
About 25 centimetres from their mouth and a few degrees off to one side. Sound falls off quickly with distance while the room noise does not, so closing the gap is the cheapest improvement available. A microphone a metre away across a table is where most family recordings go wrong.
What audio format should family recordings be stored in?
Keep whatever the device produced as the untouched master, then keep a WAV or FLAC copy for the long term. Both are open, uncompressed and simple enough to survive a change of technology. Convert anything in a proprietary dictation format now, while software that reads it still exists.
Related: All the guides · How to record your parents' life story · How to record a phone call with a parent · The first twenty minutes · What to do with the recordings afterwards · Take everything with you, whenever you like
MemoriesBox handles the recording, the storage and the formats, keeps the person's own voice, and lets your family ask it questions later. $139 a year, first 14 days free, hosted in the EU. Start here. If you would rather do it with a towel and a phone, this page is the whole method.