The recording part is also full of diffcultities, the environment and hardwares are hard to adjust, is only myself that is largely adjustable.
I have recorded the video of me speaking while listening to the video but it was over the maxium storge.
With headphoen/without
Speak seating down / stand up
Make the sound source behind the me / surrounded me
Make the sound keep repeating/ once a while
Make the sound from loud to quite and repeadly / only the first time and rest keep the same volume
Make it in the closed space/open space
With experiment, I realize it is diffcult to actually speak while the noises are filled my ears. I tried to be both the scientist and the subject today. The experiment was simple: record myself listening to the cacophony I built—the jump-scare bleeds, the washing machine’s monstrous groan, the stalking drip—while simultaneously trying to tell a coherent, pre-written story into a second microphone. I thought I could perform it. I was wrong.
For the first twenty seconds, it was manageable. I heard my own voice in my head, narrating the opening lines about a childhood memory. Then, on cue in my composition, the first clustered sonic attack hit. The microwave’s digital shriek pierced my left ear, the pan sizzle spat in my right, and a glitched knife chop stuttered in the centre. My voice didn’t just falter; it physically jumped. A stutter, a gasp for air I didn’t need. I lost my place on the script. My eyes scanned the words, but the sentence had shattered. I could see the next line, but I couldn’t assemble its meaning. The cognitive pathway between reading and speaking was severed by a wall of noise.
I pushed on. This was the point, after all. But the deeper horror wasn’t the loud moments—it was the ambient dread in between. The low, time-stretched hum of the appliances, the paranoid panning of the fridge buzz jumping between my ears. This wasn’t sound I could ignore; it was sound that demanded a low-grade, constant psychic surveillance. My brain wasn’t listening to it; it was tracking it. Where is the drip now? Is the buzz about to jump? When will the next slam come? This background tracking consumed the RAM of my mind. The part of my brain needed for threading narrative, for emotional recall in the story, was fully occupied with threat assessment.
I finished the three-minute take. My story was a hollow, fractured thing. I sounded robotic in the calm patches, desperately rushing before the next sonic wave, and utterly shattered in the aftermath of the shocks. The emotion of my childhood memory was gone, replaced by the raw emotion of the present: frustration, anxiety, and a profound sense of incompetence.
And here is where the true, chilling empathy clicked into place. This wasn’t just a successful simulation of distraction. This was a tiny, controlled taste of the erosion of self. If I, in a 3-minute performance, could feel my interiority—my memory, my narrative voice—be so utterly dismantled by a pre-recorded soundtrack, what is the cumulative effect of a lifetime of the real thing? The real demands aren’t predictable loops in Ableton. They are live, urgent, and carry emotional consequences. A baby’s cry isn’t just a sound; it’s a need. A timer isn’t just a beep; it’s a burning pot.
My frustration wasn’t a failure of the experiment. It was the data. For the first time, I didn’t just understand the theory of fragmented attention and mental load intellectually; I felt it as a neurological reality. The “invisible labour” isn’t just the physical act of cleaning. It’s the constant, high-stakes cognitive hijacking that makes sustained thought a privilege. The voice that gets lost isn’t just an audible one; it’s the quiet, continuous inner voice that constructs a coherent self. I wasn’t just mimicking interruption. I was, for three minutes, experiencing the silent violence of having your own mind colonised by the needs of a space. The housewife’s ultimate labour is fighting this colonization, every single day, and my failed recording is the proof of its brutal efficiency.