Listening to my father
A year ago my Dad died. I transcribed his radio recordings to honor his legacy and to celebrate the Macedonian language.
I packed up in haste last September. My father was not doing well and I decided to leave Montreal so I can spend time with him. I wasn’t sure how much time he had, so I put my funeral clothes in my carry-on bag and left for Macedonia. Three weeks later, my father died.
The year since has passed very slowly. You know how they say that time speeds up when you get older? Not this year. I have been observing it in slow-motion, as every day brings a little less sorrow than the day before. I have been recounting it from three continents, ten countries, and dozens of apartments and hotel rooms. Most of these places have nothing to do with my Dad, but in each of them I kept up a virtual conversation with him, in which I was patiently listening to his radio recordings and taking notes.
My father, Aleksandar Stikov, was the journalist with the most on-air minutes on national radio, and his broadcasts are a distillate of Macedonian sports history. They document hundreds of victories and losses broadcasted to listeners back when radio was the main medium of communication. They are also an archive of my Dad’s personal joys and disappointments. He was the most expressive when he was on the air.
It is a small miracle that these recordings are preserved on six USB keys, carried by his colleague Viki through the dark corridors of the Macedonian Radio Television and copied over and over on multiple laptops and external hard drives. It is also a big shame that I have no way to transcribe, search, and annotate them, because there is no good tool for transcribing the Macedonian language. I have tried Google’s Speech-to-text, OpenAI’s Whisper, and Meta’s SeamlessM4T. None of them are good enough to transcribe field recordings, such as radio broadcasts shouted over a crowd of thousands at a sports game. On a more basic level, these models also fail at standard transcription tasks, confusing adverbs and adjectives and randomly inserting Bulgarian and Serbian words and grammar.
That is when I decided to do something about it.