She Used AI to Resurrect Her Mother’s Voice—And Found the City’s Silent Echoes in a Chicago Neon Night

I never meant to make art out of loss. But one evening, walking past the flickering neon of the Red Line station near 79th, I heard my mother’s voice—not in memory, but in code.

I’d been working on ‘Echoes of the City’, a sound-map project born from late-night walks with my grandmother’s old cassette tapes: her hums in Spanish between siren songs and gospel choirs. The city didn’t speak—but it whispered. So I built an AI that learned her cadence.

I used Unity to map every step she took to work: the clink of coffee cups at 3 AM, the rhythm of her feet on cracked pavement, the way she paused before closing the clinic window. No grand drama here—just breath.

The algorithms didn’t predict grief—they mirrored it. Each line of code became a prayer.

I invited strangers to submit their own ‘Silent Voices’ recordings: a teen mom humming lullaby after midnight; an elder man whistling his veteran march through Bronzeville. We don’t need winners—we need witnesses.

This isn’t about scoring points or flipping odds. It’s about listening when no one else will.

Join us at Neon Circle: every full moon, we host an anonymous sound journal where silence is sacred—and your voice might be the next echo that keeps someone home.