A woman on TikTok went viral for sharing a “pro tip” for people getting married who want to see what their wedding guests actually think about your event. She found it accidentally, via her DIY audio guest book.
The woman, Yaya (@yayakampen), says in one of her recent videos that she accidentally recorded all of her wedding guests’ private conversations. As of Thursday, that video reached 2.3 million views on TikTok.
Yaya explains that she wanted to buy an audio guest book that allows guests to leave a message for the wedding couple on a phone. After the ceremony, the manufacturer takes the phone and compiles all the guests’ messages on an audio system like a vinyl record. The idea was cute but far too expensive, the TikToker says, so she decided to make her own version.
After thrifting an old-fashioned phone, Yaya installed a tiny, sound-sensitive audio recorder in it. The recorder would only record when it heard the sound of a voice, so Yaya assumed she would be able to listen to all of the nice individual messages her guests left her after the ceremony. However, she got more than she expected.
@yayakampen Accidental tea lol ☎️🤫🕵️♀️ #weddingtips #audioguestbook ♬ original sound – Yaya
When she listened to the recordings a week after her wedding, she realized the recorder was so sensitive that it picked up all the voices from the entire outdoor venue.
“So it’s like two hours of audio of like people leaving messages, of course, but then literally everything else happening the entire wedding day,” Yaya says in the video.
The TikToker says the audio recorder picked up a lot of “shit” she was not expecting. She realized that her gay wedding had caused a lot of drama in her small town and in her extended family. Yaya adds that she and her partner apparently sparked the drama by un-inviting guests who were “clearly” unsupportive of their marriage.
One viewer broke down the bride’s story in a comment, “Omg so you wiretapped your event [laughing emoji].”
Other viewers commented that the story is an example of why companies charge so much for the professional version of an audio guest book.
“That’s why the companies charge $600 lol,” one user said.
“I’d have to pay the $700 just to not end up hurting my own feelings,” another user wrote.
After several viewers commented saying they wanted to hear the audio clips, Yaya shares some of them in a follow-up TikTok video. To demonstrate how sensitive the recorder was, she plays an audio clip that a guest intentionally left, which was easy to hear but full of background noise.
Then, Yaya shares another audio clip of two cousins chatting about why certain people weren’t at the wedding. While the audio isn’t as clear as the intentional recordings, it’s fairly easy to hear.
In the audio clip, one of the cousins tells the other that the people they’re talking about weren’t at the wedding because they were uninvited.
“Like how tacky and disrespectful can you be?” the cousin says, presumably talking about Yaya and her spouse.
The TikToker doesn’t share much more audio, saying that she would have had to bleep too many names out for people’s privacy. She says one of the cousins continued to call her “tasteless and disrespectful” and acted shocked that certain people were uninvited.
The Daily Dot reached out to Yaya via TikTok comment.
