About
About Me
I pay attention to the sounds you usually ignore: the hum in the walls, the way footsteps echo in a new apartment, the silence that feels a little too sharp. Rear Tone is where I write about what it means for a place to finally sound like home.
A job interview that started with a strange question
I recently took on a job that required me to describe how I handle the downtime between projects. The person interviewing me asked how I reacted when everything went quiet, when there wasn’t anything urgent to do.
Without really thinking, I answered, “Very well!” I said I loved the calm parts just as much as the busy ones. The conversation moved on, but the question stuck with me long after the call ended. Did I really handle quiet well? Or had I just learned how to live inside of it?
Rear Tone grew out of that question. It’s not about chasing perfect silence or drowning everything out—it’s about what happens in the background. The small, ordinary sounds that slowly become the soundtrack of a life.
When a place looks like home, but doesn’t sound like it
Not long ago, I moved into a new place that, on paper, checked all the boxes. The walls were painted, the furniture was in, my things were where they were supposed to be. It looked like home. But it didn’t sound like it.
The first days were full of sharp, unfamiliar quiet. I could hear my own footsteps in a way I never had before. The fridge felt louder. The pipes had a schedule I didn’t understand yet. Even the silence between these sounds felt wrong, like it belonged to someone else’s life.
I realized how much of “home” is noise I never noticed: a neighbor’s door closing, traffic from a familiar street, the background hum of a place that knows you—and that you know back.
Noise isn’t always chaos. Sometimes it’s comfort. Sometimes it’s how you know you’re finally in the right place.
-Me
It took weeks before the new apartment began to sound less like a temporary stop and more like somewhere I actually lived. Somewhere in those days, the echo of my footsteps softened. I stopped noticing the fridge at night. Other sounds quietly moved in—my own routines, my own mess, my own life.
That shift is hard to explain, but you can feel it. One morning you wake up and realize that whatever room you’re in no longer feels like a borrowed space. The background sounds belong to you now. They’ve gone from strange to familiar, from loud to barely there.
I think often about my dad cheering for the Trojans—how his voice filled the house so completely that you could feel it in your ribs. I miss that specific kind of loud, the way it made everything else fade into the background. There’s a kind of grief in learning to live without certain sounds, and a kind of hope in noticing the new ones that slowly replace them.
What I explore here
Rear Tone is a place to pay attention to the sounds and silences that don’t usually get a name. I write about:
- How a new place can feel wrong until the background noise settles in.
- The way grief and memory live inside the sounds we’ve lost.
- Small, ordinary noises that quietly mark time: a kettle, a door, a car in the distance.
- What it means when silence feels comforting—and when it feels like too much.
If you’ve ever paused in a new apartment, a new city, or a new version of your life and thought, “This doesn’t sound like me yet,” you’re in the right place. I’m interested in that in‑between—when you’re still learning the noise of your own life again.
Why I write
I write about ordinary moments because they’re where the real shifts happen. You rarely get a clear, cinematic before-and-after. Instead, you get small changes in the way a room echoes, the way your own voice sounds on the phone, the way you notice—or stop noticing—a noise that used to bother you.
For me, sound is one of the quietest ways home reveals itself. It’s also one of the tools we have for building a new one. Paying attention to the audio of daily life—what’s missing, what’s new, what’s slowly fading into the background—has helped me understand where I’ve been and where I’m going.
If you’ve ever noticed the quiet after a move, the wrongness of a too‑thin wall, or the comfort of a familiar noise coming back, I think you’ll find something here that sounds like you.
Keep listening with me
If any of this feels familiar, you might like the essays and notes I share on the rest of Rear Tone. They’re all small attempts to pay attention to what we usually tune out.