Making Tapes in Poland: The Compact Cassette at Home

Abstract

This article offers a history of the compact cassette in Poland from 1963 to 2015, focusing on its vibrant presence as the medium of choice for unofficial musical culture. I explore tapes’ capacity to reveal a history of everyday musical and technological fluencies: as a sonic archive they offer a window into networked epistemologies of sound under state socialism. Listening to homemade tapes – a process that builds on ethnographic encounters with their makers – I explore the work we can hear across the medium's noisy recordings and stress their position at the crossroads of musicology's methodologies. Tape's reusability, so carefully explained in historical anecdotes and technical manuals in the 1960s, facilitated democratic debate for the social movements of the 1980s. The format's fungibility and plurality made it not only a convenient conduit for discussion, but also a medium that – in form and substance – modelled the importance of dissent, revision, and return in political discourse.

Transnationalizing Radio Research

“…al. 2013;de Kosnik 2016), which is a necessary perspective in radio scholarship on recording practices and archives, in order to do more justice to audience listening, consumption and recording practices, particularly in transnational frameworks, such as across the Cold War's 'Iron Curtain' (Badenoch/Fickers/Henrich-Franke 2013;Bohlman 2017). In this vein -considering transnational radio consumption and memory processes -Jaimie Baron (2013) has argued that the digital circulation of archival materials calls for new perspectives beyond official institutions, such as the BBC or British Library Sound Archive, and attending more to how these materials produce experiences for its present-day audiences.…”

High-frequency Noise Removal of Vintage Songs in Audio Cassettes using Signal Processing Techniques

“…A stereo pair or a single monophonic track is played or recorded when the tape is moving in one direction, while another one does the same when the tape moves in the other direction (Andriessen, 1999;Bohlman, 2017) Compact cassettes can be categorized based on the magnetic material used in the tape. The gamma ferric oxide (γ-Fe₂O₃) was used as the original magnetic material in compact cassettes and its performances were enhanced by the 3M company using a cobalt volume doping process combined with a double-coating technique (Daniel et al, 1999).…”

Copy (the Music) and Share (the Tape). On the Institutionalization of “Piracy” in the Polish People’s Republic

“…Linking e.g. the situation on the PRL music market with directives issued by the Culture Department of the Polish United Workers' Party in Założenia programowe polityki nagraniowej i wydawniczej [Programmatic premises of recording and releasing policy] dated 1983 (Idzikowska-Czubaj 2012, 7).3 The specific role of compact cassettes in the communicative circulation in Poland is discussed at length by Andrea F. Bohlman(Bohlman 2017). …”