A short video exploring the deterioration of audio cassette tape, recorded with a digital 6-track mixer.

This particular piece of my Project Brief was a fun one. Essentially the idea was simple: show the way in which analog media decays by not only playing back tapes that had been stored for ten-fifteen years but also to illustrate the size and obsolete nature of old media. In this particular piece, I recorded a tape using a four track tape recorder-mixer that was considered to be extremely valuable, in today’s currency it would have been approximately twice as expensive as the Zoom recorder it’s connected to in the video, however the Zoom H6 is not only more capable, it’s recordings will not degrade naturally over time. The central theme of this particular piece is transience, specifically, of media.

The original recordings were a combination of demos of different songs my dad had, and even just to get the mixer to play the tracks, the mixer had to be taken completely apart and have a ribbon mechanism replaced with a rubber band. You almost certainly wouldn’t just be able to go out and buy and 4-track cassette tape mixer today so this process, I guess highlighted again, the temporary nature of all media; who knows when the H6 will be another useless piece of recording technology?

In “Perfect Sound Forever”: Innovation, Aesthetics, and the Re-making of Compact Disc Playback, Kieran Downes quotes J Gordon Holt, an editor of an underground audiophile journal at the time, “I wish to make it very clear that I do not, nor have I ever, asserted that digital reproduction is perfect. What I HAVE said, and still say, is that it is a helluva lot more-nearly perfect than any analog [record/play] system.” The truth is even the technology that was being described then was CD quality (that is 44,100 samples per second, with a bitrate of 16 bits per channel). Even a portable recorder like the Zoom H6 can record up to 96,000kHz/24bit which is ‘a helluva lot’ better than even what they were worried about then. In the Minidisc versus Cassette article in the Technical Update by the Oral History Society Vol. 27, No. 2, Alan Ward, Rob Perks and Peter Copeland discuss the recording quality of cassette by describing “an analog format: there is always some unwanted noise on recordings which increases in proportion to the wanted material each time it is copied. […] Cassette is not regarded as a serious medium for recording and preserving more complex sounds such as music.” The key here is the suggestion that using cassette to preserve data is impractical, because over time the tape warps. In some cases, this is an effect that digital music producers attempt to emulate but it is undesirable if you are storing the media for later use. It certainly surprises me that analog media was so expensive to use considering that a mixer to record to cassette was more expensive than a recorder that could be used today for professional use.

DOWNES, K. (2010). “Perfect Sound Forever”: Innovation, Aesthetics, and the Re-making of Compact Disc Playback. Technology and Culture, 51(2), 305-331. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.lib.rmit.edu.au/stable/40647101

Ward, A., Perks, R., & Copeland, P. (1999). Minidisc versus Cassette. Oral History, 27(2), 90-92. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.lib.rmit.edu.au/stable/40179549

Sasha Frere-Jones (2004) The Sound of Decay The New Yorker. Retrieved from http://http://www.newyorker.com/ on March 26th, 2017