Wednesday, April 3, 2019

A Small Comfort


Last January The Wife's nephew was murdered.

He was trying to protect someone else by talking a gun-wielding man down, a man The Nephew had given a place to stay. The man shot The Nephew instead.

The Nephew was a complicated man who didn't do the best job of taking care of himself, but would give the shirt off his back to help others, including those the rest of us do our best to avoid.

Violent events like this can cut some of the fragile strings that keep us stabilized within our world and that's a helpless feeling, but The Wife, while casting around for some small thing she could do for her sister in the middle of dealing with all this, came across OandBstudios where Vlado will, for a very reasonable price, turn an audio file into a personalized soundwave print.

Vlado works with you, collecting the necessary information and sending samples for approval or revisions, to turn your audio clip into a customized high-res JPEG that you can then have printed on paper or canvas. (He includes two separate JPEG's in the final product, one is for a standard print the other has an additional 1.5 inches on each edge for printing a museum-mount canvas.)

While hunting for an audio file The Nephew's other Aunt located an MP3 of him singing a song he was working on while accompanying himself with guitar. It was a work in progress and now progress has been halted, but in the song, which he titled Our Shining Light, The Nephew sings "Can you see my shining light." which seemed fitting for the circumstances.

(I wanted to include the MP3 here but it turns out that is complicated and involves creating yet another site on an external host, which I'm not inclined to do since I already have more than enough of an on-line presence to feed my paranoia.)





This is the customized image of The Nephew's own words in his own voice.

We sent the JPEG off to CanvasPop to be printed and mounted. Everything went off without a hitch and The Nephew's mother now has it hanging in her hallway.




4 comments:

  1. Sorry to hear about the violent act but that is a great way to remember him. I've never heard of anything like that. I might have to check into that although like you, I am not a fan of 3rd party services as a 'host' of images or recordings.

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    1. We made a bunch of full-sized paper copies too because a bunch of his friends are getting together this weekend to celebrate his birthday.

      We e-mailed the MP3 directly to Vlado as an attachment. The only reason we would have to involve a 3rd party hosting site is if I wanted to add it to this post as well.

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  2. Sorry for your family loss but what a wonderful idea to keep a memory alive.

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    1. It did go over pretty well at the birthday party The Nephew's friends threw for him the other day. As an indicator of what kind of guy he was to those that knew him, those same friends have set up a regular movie-night at his mother's house where they get together and watch one of his favorites.

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