Heard/Read/Seen

The SoundBlog's log of things read, heard, seen; by Harold Schellinx. (Dutch tweets & followin
Oct 27, 2013 4 min read

Did I Say There Is No Hell?

About what might have happened to a 100 billion audio
compact cassettes

Until just a couple of years ago, thousands of miles of thrashed audio

cassette tape were decorating our city streets, avenues, lanes, alleys and
parks, spread out there like randomly scattered shit-colored party
streamers. You wouldve seen tape everywhere. If only you had paid
attention...

Most of it ended up there from cassettes that got stuck in a music

lovers car cassette player our walkman. I am sure that most of you will
not be too young to have experienced this annoying analog bug first
hand: suddenly the music you were listening to comes to a grinding
halt and you start plucking at the little plastic box in your player;which
then comes out, along with this long tangled thread of plastic tape

Cassettes were much like mp3's. One could always make another copy,
and the things were dirt cheap. Cassettes were utterly disposable. So
why go through the trouble of mending a cassette? They were just
thrown out, especially those that got stuck while you were driving.
 Williamsburg, BrooklynSeptember 16th, 2007

But these days when you look around in our streets, in the under-
ground, in buses, our trains or in cars, you will find that theres hardly
anybody listening to music on cassettes anymore. As a means for music
mass consumption the cassette has become obsolete. The days that pop
music hit-albums sold many millions also in pre-recorded cassette for-
mat (as well as being illegally copied onto blank cassette tapes another
many, many million more times) will never come back again. In this,
the year of its 50th anniversary, the long threads of plastic covered
with magnetic emulsion in a thin plastic box, developed by ir. Lou Ot-
tens and his team for Philips Electronics Inc. and presented to the world
in August 1963 at an international consumer electronics exhibition in
Berlin, have all but disappeared from public view.

Where did all the tapes go?

Myeducated guess is that about half of them ended up on dumps,

in landfills and other garbage repositories. Much of the remaining half
is currently gathering dust in closets, cellars and attics, but will surely
also end up in the gutter within the next couple of decades or so.

Is it possible to imagine the sheer volume, the quantity of this waste,

given the fact that in the mere fifty years of its existence our world was
flooded with cassettes?

Let me give it a try

The number of audio compact cassettes that were produced world wide
in the five decades since its introduction has been, according to an au-
thoritative estimation, roughly between the 50 and 100 billion. That
makes an average of more than ten cassette tapes (more than ten hours
of recorded sound and music) for every single human being alive. For
arguments sake, let us stick to the max and assume, for simplicitys
sake, that all of them were C60's. These cassettes had an eective play-
ing time of between 30 and 34 minutes for each side,and contained on
the average some 90 meters of magnetic tape. Which means that we
couldve spliced the past 50 years of cassette tape into one meta-mega
tape, stretching out over a length of no less than 9 billion kilometers.

It would take, ladies and gentlemen readers, a spark of light more than
8 hours to travel from one end to the other; we could stretch our meta-
mega-tape all the way from here to Neptune and back again; playing it
would take about 11.4 million years: if we hit play now, the meta-mega-
cassettes playback will not stop before the time that the ring of debris
around Mars has crashed upon the surface of that very planet.

And then finally, imagine: almost all of the music wed hear coming
from our meta-mega-tape would be that of a mindboggling number of
copies of Michael Jackson albums and similar top selling pop chart hits,
endlessly repeating

So, did I say there is no Hell?