The Voice Box

Every object tells a story. This one has 42 of them.

Joey Wilson
Pandemic Diaries
Published in
8 min readApr 8, 2015

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“Hi Joe, it’s your dad. Sorry I missed you. Give me a call when you can. Love you”

This was the last voicemail I received from my dad before a series of strokes left him unable to speak. He would die a year later.

I didn’t know at the time that this would be his last voicemail or that I would come to treasure this little snippet of audio, but for those of you who have lost someone you love, you know how these seemingly-trivial bits of ephemera can come to hold great meaning.

The sound of a recorded voice is a time machine of sorts, a gossamer thread to the past. To recreate the unique vibration in the air that existed from another time is one of those modern miracles so common today as to be considered unremarkable. However, should that vibration be a human voice, should it be the wholly unique imprint of someone you’ve loved and lost, remarkable can hardly begin to describe it.

This is the tale of a simple wooden box that tells stories at the touch of a button.

It’s also a story about my dad.

My father was Larry Wilson. He was a teacher and an entrepreneur, having founded several successful companies including The Wilson Learning Corporation and, later, The Pecos River Learning Center. At the heart of both of these companies was his love of both teaching, often unconventionally, and learning, a topic he remained fascinated in for his entire life.

He was also a talker, and I mean that in a BIG way. To say he had the gift of gab hardly captures it. He was a born story teller, a yarn spinner, and the stories he told, which he told often, became part of the fabric of my childhood. I was the youngest in our family and some of my earliest memories, while sitting in a high chair no doubt, was of him holding court with my older siblings telling one story or another. He loved telling stories and he loved and encouraged his children to tell stories, which they would do, often around the dinner table, often simultaneously. It was a happy kind of chaos.

My father often did his best thinking out loud and at one time or another we had all played the role of his sounding board. I remember sitting on an airplane with my dad as he explained, with great excitement, an existential mental model dealing with human potential and fulfillment. He drew a box with two axis and described each of the four quadrants in concise detail. He drew a line across the page and wrote birth on one side and death on the other. He wanted me to understand that we only have so much time in this world, and this lifeline was the playing field. “We need to become the best that we can be between these two points,” he said, “and no one knows our potential and we will die eventually on this path as we strive to find out. But that is the adventure of a lifetime!” he exclaimed.

I was ten years old on that airplane. That was my dad.

That this was an unconventional conversation with a ten year old never occurred to me. It did however occur to the women sitting next to to us on that plane who politely asked my dad, “Who are you? Are you a doctor?”

“No.” He said, “I’m a father.”

The Voice

The origin of my father’s career started with his ability to capture and hold an audience with his stories. These stories, and the lessons they contained, became some of the first products, recorded on vinyl records, of my father’s then fledgling company, The Wilson Learning Corporation, in 1966.

Larry Wilson the Speaker

From a corporate perspective, this was the Mad Men era and my dad was often hired as a “motivational speaker” to rally the troops in an effort to increase sales. I’ve since listened to many of these early speeches and have concluded that he took a bit of a Trojan horse approach. He could be very funny, but between the jokes, he was telling a larger, deeper story, essentially asking folks to consider the question he was asking himself. “Who am I and why am I here”?

My father’s speeches, I have been discovering, when assembled chronologically, chart his own path of self discovery.

Shortly after I lost my dad on April 6th of 2013, once I could bring myself to do it, I started listening to his speeches from a different, more cathartic place. Hearing his voice was comforting, and I would often close my eyes and imagine that he was in the room with me. The jokes in particular made it easy to imagine that we were just having a beer, shooting the breeze, telling stories. That he was, in a word, alive.

LittleBits

In May of 2012 I attended Maker Faire in San Mateo California. It’s half science fair, half Burning Man. Most of the attendees were there to celebrate the spirit of invention for invention’s sake. While I was there I met Ayah Bdeir who had just introduced, and was demoing, a series of electronic modules called LittleBits.

This amazing little kit, at that time really a prototype, had ingeniously removed much of the complexity of creating electronic circuits, allowing mere mortals to create, through simple modules, devices that up until that time could only have been created by large companies seeking mass audiences. What Ayah had unleashed on the world was an enabling technology that posed the following question.

“If regular people had the ability to create whatever electronic device they wanted for themselves, what might they create?”

I bought a basic kit, and considered the question for myself. To be honest, when I came home from the conference, I put the kit on the shelf and forgot about it for a time. A year passed. My dad died, and then during a hastily performed iPhone upgrade at an Apple store in Albuquerque, I lost all of my treasured voicemails in one fell swoop.

The Voice Box

Losing the voicemails from my father was the catalyst for creating the Voice Box. I imagined a beautiful little wooden box that would sit on the mantle, with a single button that, when pushed, would recount a joke or a story in my father’s voice. I spent a few days going through my father’s speeches once more, pulling out the jokes and stories that made me smile and with a handful of LittleBits at the ready, I went to work. In the end I had captured 42 of these jokes and stories in a little wooden box.

The front and inside of the Voice Box. The LittleBit modules are attached to a piece of wood that is held firmly to the box via magnets in the corners. The back cover (not shown here) is also held with magnets making disassembly a very quick process with no tools required.

The circuit itself was quite simple and a testament to the elegant design of LittleBits. The box began its life holding Cuban cigars. I cut it in half and drilled the holes using a sink strainer as a guide.

A side view (left) and the sink strainer I used as a guide to drill the speaker holes (right)

Currently the Voice Box lives within arms’ reach on a small ledge in my studio and when, out of habit, I have the urge to pick up the phone and call my dad, I’ll catch myself and instead push the button and listen to one story or another. Although my dad lost his voice before he died, I’d like to think, in a small way, within a small box, I gave it back. At least a littlebit.

A Few Samples

The Goldfish Story
The Whistle
The Driveway Story

A Market of One

Can you imagine a world where the only food you eat is food that has been prepared for you, and the only food prepared is food that has been determined to have mass appeal? This is the current state of consumer electronics where the singular object with a market cap of one would not be pursued.

But there is another story emerging that can allow ordinary folks to make something just for themselves. I like to think of it as a home cooked meal. The Voice Box is a small part of that story and has been very satisfying to me, its only intended audience. Although I’m fairly sure my dad would have loved it.

In that case, maybe its a market of two.

Epilogue — Full Circle

In 1983, when I was 20 years old, my father gave me book by Seymour Papert called Mindstorms: Children, Computers, And Powerful Ideas. The book was a deep dive into the powerful possibilities that technology might offer education but more than that it was a book about the theory of learning itself.

In the book Papert describes his early childhood fascination with gears and how they provided him with a mental model that aided in his understanding of mathematics. When he went on to develop the Logo computer language, he was motivated by this early insight and wanted to provide other children with these “objects to think with” as he called them.

I just recently found my original copy of Mindstorms that my father had given to me 33 years ago. Although the pages were a bit yellowed, I discovered something when I opened that book that I had forgotten. He actually had given me his copy of the book and he, as he would often do when he found a book interesting, had filled nearly every other page with underlines and little insights written into the margins.

Again it feels like a time machine. Like I’m reading this book with my dad looking over my shoulder pointing out the interesting bits.

For Mindstorms I thank Seymour Papert. Both for how he inspired my father and I, and, perhaps indirectly, Ayah Bdeir. I feel in some way there may not have been a LittleBits without the work of Seymour Papert.

I would also like to thank Ayah Bdeir for her inspired creation of LittleBits, a whole family of objects to think with. She is an engineer with a poets heart and the vision of an artist and for that I am grateful.

Wow, indeed.

Joey Wilson, Santa Fe, New Mexico

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