Music to our ears

Show a child an old cassette and tell him or her that it contains music and you’ll probably get a nonplussed response from them.

Two brothers from the UK, Benny and Rafi Fine, have seen the viral potential of this kind of thing, and have recently started a series on YouTube called Kids React To Technology. Their latest film features the baffled responses of a group of children to the Sony Walkman; the cassette format makes virtually no sense to them, and it’s not hard to see why.

While vinyl has experienced a hipster resurgence in popularity, the cassette, with its stern instructions to ‘spool to end of tape before playing other side’, looks hilariously retro. But it may be about to experience a shift in cultural perception.

A technological breakthrough from Sony means that these thin strips of tape, once so disposable, now hold the key to large-scale back-ups of data. Tape has been used since the 1950s to hold computer data, from early mainframe spools to the Sinclair audio cassette, but the plummeting price of harddrive storage again made tape largely obsolete.

But we’re creating huge quantities of data these days, and new tricks are required to cope with it all: Sony’s new method can cram some 148Gb of data into one square inch of tape. A cassette-sized spool could hold some 185 terabytes of data — the same as 3,700 Blu-ray discs, or the equivalent of more than 500,000 CD-quality albums.

Today’s children may, in a few years’ time, regard it with a certain awe; not just a collection of 20 lo-fi songs, but a container for one’s entire life.

Independent