It was best known by far as a medium for home recording music. Around the early ’70s, the audio cassette took over from the much more cumbersome reel to reel tape as the default means of capturing sound in the consumer domain. The cassette’s compactness gave it a new level of convenience, coupled with very low cost both in terms of media and recording equipment.
People used audio cassettes in a way they wouldn’t use reel to reel, and kids commonly used cassettes too. All of this helped open up a broader span of usage. Families recorded their favourite songs from the radio, bands taped their rehearsals and gave the cassettes to pub landlords in the hope of getting gigs… Most people probably recall or envisage cassettes in these roles. If you’re old enough, you may also associate cassette tapes with self-help, motivational and training courses.
But deep back in ye olde distant past, audio cassettes performed a wide range of other tasks. Some of them functional, some wild and wacky, some darkly sinister. In this post I’m revisiting some of those less well-remembered applications. And in the finest traditions of Spinal Tap, the list goes up to eleven…
In their heyday, audio cassettes were used…
TO RECORD TELEVISION PROGRAMMES
Before the 1980s, videotape was rarely found in the home. Both the recording/playback equipment and the actual tapes had been horrendously expensive in the second half of the ’70s when home video was first establishing itself in the consumer domain. So at that time it was routine to find family members recording important TV programmes on audio cassettes. There was no picture, obviously, but sound was better than nothing at all.
The most commonly-recorded transmissions were programmes in the genres of music and education. People doing Open University courses would very typically record the accompanying TV broadcasts, so they could recap on the information. And live concerts were popular with home recordists, as were stand-up comedy routines.
TO RECORD AUDIO CODES (“TAPE DUMP”)
Analogue audio codes enabled people with electronic devices to store memory information before computers were in widespread use. The process was normally known as a “tape dump”.
The sound bank information in a digital synthesizer, for example, could be output to a tape cassette as a series of bleeps and warbles. Once the code was safely stored on tape, the synth memory could be cleared and reprogrammed. To restore the original sound bank, the user would simply connect the tape up to the synth, replay the code, and the synth would respond by magically setting its parameters to the original values. The Yamaha DX9 synth came with this feature, as did a range of beatboxes.
Early on, when computer disk space was prohibitively expensive, computers themselves would often dump info to audio cassette tape, which was cheap and plentiful. Tape dumps continued into the 1990s, alongside timecoding – a synchronisation technique that could run a computer music sequencer in precise time with the music on an audio cassette. The fascinating timecode process placed the bleepy-warbly code on the same tape as the actual music.
IN FANCY DRESS
It would mean destroying a cassette, but audio tape could be, and was, used in fancy dress. Pulled off the reels and scrunched up, the tape media could serve as a mop of alien hair that was way wilder than any wig – especially when sprayed with paint.
FOR SPOOKS AND PRANKS
Cheap cassette players were usually battery powered and very portable. And that meant kids could record spooky sounds on them – often from TV – and then hide them in places people didn’t expect them to be.
One trick that went round as a local trend around 1978 involved recording a weird noise near the end of a tape, starting the player on a long blank section, and then concealing it in a cupboard or under a cushion. The original plan was to scare whoever was in the room when the playback finally reached the sound. But that rarely worked, so the idea evolved into a comedy prank, which replaced the spooky noise with a “jokeshop” sound – normally a burp, or worse.
TO RECORD RAILWAY LOCOMOTIVES
Train spotting was a phenomenally popular hobby for UK boys in the 1970s and 1980s. It was part of a trinity of major pursuits for lads – the other two being football and girls.
The diesel locomotives of the day – like the steam traction before them – had made distinctive and often very evocative sounds. Recording those sounds on tape became popular, and even overflowed into the professional domain. Locomotive sounds appeared both on commercial audio tapes and on vinyl records. They later sold as CDs. I know someone who was fanatical about recording trains of the 1970s and 1980s on cassettes, and still has all his recordings today.
IN HOME GAMING
Until the mid 1970s, indoor home gaming did not involve a computer. When the stakes were high, and keeping score was a challenge, a cassette recording could help resolve likely disputes.
Even after computer gaming arrived, it took a long time to wean the various communities over to computers. As kids, we had a Subbuteo league. Subbuteo was a popular table soccer game with boys in the UK, but it was also highly competitive and prone to bitter disagreements in high-scoring games.
Recording the games on audio tape helped to prevent or settle the worst of those disagreements, and could also prove incredibly entertaining if someone involved had been a particularly bad loser.
FOR OFFICE DICTATION
Not everyone could type as fast as the boss could talk. So live dictation often went down onto audio tape in the first instance. Tapes were also used to record important meetings so that minutes could be drafted after the event.
FOR MAGAZINE INTERVIEWS
If you read a magazine interview in the 1970s or 1980s, the words as spoken by the featured luminary would almost inevitably have been recorded onto an audio cassette.
In 1994, Guitarist magazine editor Eddie Allen related a story about staff writer David Mead suddenly being told to expect a phone call from Frank Zappa (no less) in 1993, but being caught without a recording device. The story then details an elaborate race against time in which Allen manages to get a recorder to Mead via his wife in a car park drop-off scenario. Whether the recorder was tape-powered or by that time digital he didn’t say, but certainly in the ’70s and and early ’80s, all of those interviews would have been taped.
TO REVERSE SOUNDS FOR SPECIAL EFFECTS
Ordinary cassette players recorded each side of the cassette in an opposing direction, so whichever way you put the tape in the machine, it would play forwards. But devices such as Portastudios recorded both sides of the tape cassette in a single direction, meaning that when you inserted a recorded tape on its other side, it played backwards.
Deliberately inserting the tape the wrong way round allowed the recordist to produce special effects such as backward drum hits, with the reverb tail creating a swell before the impact.
IN CRIME
The Police notoriously used audio cassettes to record interviews, but surely the most sinister application for an audio cassette was as a means of delayed communication between serious criminals and either their victims, or the Police. Before high-level forensics gained a foothold, kidnappers or serial killers would sometimes use cassettes to record demands or taunts, before sending them through the post.
AS A CURE FOR INSOMNIA
Cassettes containing “pink noise” or ocean wave sounds could be used as an aid to sleep, where other sounds such as dripping rain were causing a distraction. The same, gentle, flowing sounds could serve as stress-relief. What was so special about a tape, over and above a record? Tapes have natural playback hiss, which would cover the highest fidelty frequencies in the continuum of sound. Neither vinyl records nor CDs could do this. Only magnetic tape has the magical final ingredient.
I bet you can think of a few other uses, now I’ve started the ball rolling…
Tape Tardis 