Category Archives: Music

The Tech in My Life #10: Portable music

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As a kid growing up in the 1960s, portable music meant a transistor radio, tuned into one of the pirate radio stations broadcasting from unseaworthy vessels and abandoned structures in international waters off the UK coast. Hence my lifelong love of psychedelic music, as the pirate DJs had playlists beyond the commercial top 40 that was featured on the “Fab” Radio Luxembourg.

Later, the fledging BBC Radio 1 (and later still, the first UK commercial radio stations of the early 1970s) added to the wider choice of popular music, and the introduction of genre-specific programmes, sometimes with a regional focus or predominantly playing album tracks rather than singles.

Aside from the hippies on board Radio Caroline, my night-time listening in the 1970s comprised John Peel’s BBC Radio 1 programme, which kindled my interest in punk and beyond. (Peel once played a track by Greenfield Leisure on which I played guitar.)

Alongside transistor radios, portable cassette decks made it possible to compile your own mixtapes (and copy your mate’s records), but it wasn’t until the Sony Stowaway (later the Walkman) that cassettes became truly portable. Such was the interest in this new playback format that the British Electronic Foundation recorded a cassette-only album in its honour (“Music for Stowaways”), and Bow Wow Wow released a cassette-only album called “Your Cassette Pet”.  Having gone through several different portable cassette players, I ended up with the Sony WM-GX674 released in 1999, to mark the Walkman’s 20th anniversary.

The Sony Walkman unwittingly made it much easier for fans (and bootleggers) to record live concerts, and I still have a bunch of cassettes from London’s Camden Market of live shows I attended only days before. The growth in cassettes led the music industry to launch its ill-conceived “Home Taping is Killing Music” anti-piracy campaign – little did they know what lay ahead….

The next shift in music portability was the Compact Disc equivalent of the Walkman, the imaginatively named Sony Discman. While not 100% skip-proof, the Discman and its competitors did allow commuters, pedestrians and even joggers to enjoy music on the move (using personal earphones in public spaces, of course…).

A number of other recording formats appeared during the early 1990s, such as the Digital Compact Cassette, Digital Audio Tape and the MiniDisc, but despite their superior audio quality and portability, they failed to catch on with the general public, and have mostly disappeared.

Unlike CDs, which are enjoying something of a revival – especially as consumers like the permanence of owning a physical artefact, as opposed to paying rent to a streaming platform. Plus, streaming platforms can remove content at will, making it unavailable to customers. I recently bought a new CD player, the CP2 from KM5. Although not as compact as my old Discman, it is still highly portable, and includes a loud speaker (unlike the Discman), and can both receive and send audio via bluetooth; and unlike the old Discman, it doesn’t require batteries, being chargeable via USB-C.

The internet age brought with it a new audio format, the mp3 file. If the music industry was worried about cassette piracy, it was nothing compared to file-sharing enabled by tech such as BitTorrent, and peer-to-peer platforms that deployed it. But when the first portable mp3 players emerged in the late 1990s, their storage capacity was limited to barely an album’s worth of songs. Also, the mp3 and digital music in general brought with them a new format war, as tech companies and music labels tried to control how consumers access, store and playback their music. This threatened issues of incompatibility, with digital content being locked to specific devices, or to specific record labels, using their own digital rights management protocols.

Thankfully, the first iPod from Apple played most digital file formats, alongside Apple’s own proprietary m4a format, tied to their devices and Apple’s iTunes download store. And thanks to their increased storage capacity, shuffle function and connectivity to iTunes, iPods became hugely popular, especially when a lot of new music was not always released in physical formats. I have had several generations of iPods over the years, and I still own models from 2005 and 2008, which often accompany me on overseas trips. I also have an iPod Touch from 2012, just for good measure.

Now, with my iPhone, I don’t use it to store music, apart from a small amount of content linked to my iTunes account. I don’t subscribe to Apple Music or Spotify, either. Instead, I use my Bandcamp library, and occasionally Soundcloud, as well as streaming some podcasts and radio stations (subject to geo-blocking, of course…). I choose not to use music streaming services because: 1) I prefer to buy my music as direct from the artists as possible, or in formats where artists are earning a better share of royalties compared to streaming; 2) some streaming content is geo-blocked so I can’t access it in Australia 3) I like to be in control of what I am listening to, rather than being a passive consumer of whatever streaming platforms (and marketing budgets) think I should be listening to 4) I don’t trust the streaming algorithms.

One of the reasons I bought an iPhone was to use iOS apps to make my own music, thanks to the plethora of synthesisers and other production tools that were launched off the back of this new and portable operating system. But that’s another story…

Next week #11: Productivity Tools

The Tech in My Life #4: Reel-to-Reel Tape Deck 

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When I was a kid, my family had a late 1950s/early 1960s Grundig reel-to-reel portable tape deck. I don’t really know why my father bought it, because the only home recordings I can recall were of my siblings and I playing the recorder (badly), and an attempt to tape an episode of Top of The Pops on BBC TV.

Although simple in design, it was actually quite cumbersome to use. The motor and the electronics generated significant machine hum which leaked on to the audio. It was mono, but offered 4 tracks – 2 in each direction – and in theory, it could record overdubs and play both signals back together, if only you could sync the play and record heads. Years later, I used it as a guitar amp, but I could only hear this auxiliary signal if the deck was in “play” or “record” mode – so I would have it on “pause” all the time, which tended to stretch and tear any tape.

Nevertheless, it sparked my life-long interest in tape, which took off when I eventually acquired my own tape deck in the early 1970s. The humble “compact cassette tape”, when combined with a portable record and playback machine, was the way many young people got into making their own music. Not only did these machines often include a built-in radio (vital for recording John Peel sessions on BBC radio 1), they also enabled live overdubbing (and cassette duplicating with twin-deck tape-to-tape functionality). I had a portable cassette player in the early 1980s that had a built-in stereo microphone as well as proper audio inputs for external sources such as guitars, keyboards, microphones and record players. So it was possible to not just make mixtapes but also make your own home recordings, which could sound pretty decent. I even played around with tape loops, and splicing cassettes, but in a pretty amateurish way. A friend had a Tascam 4-track Cassette Portastudio, in the mid-80s, on which I made some demos of my own music.

Cassettes were a way to produce and circulate music cheaply, and there was a cottage industry of bands and labels distributing albums on cassette, via mail order, using small ads in the weekly music papers. (I own an original copy of one such self-released cassette from 1981, which last sold on-line for over US$180.) Less scrupulously, you could go to somewhere like Camden Market on the weekend and buy a tape of a gig you’d been to just a few nights before.

But, with the arrival of read/write CDs, Digital Audio Tape, MiniDiscs and Digital Compact Cassette, the analogue compact cassette fell out of favour in the late 1980s and early 1990s. And then the music industry decided to discontinue most of these newer formats, because of the increased risk of piracy and bootleg recordings.

Yet, the compact cassette still survives today, alongside a renewed interest in tape loops, and the early pioneers of electronic music and musique concrète. New albums and reissues are being released on cassette, and for a number of years there was Cassette Store Day as a sort of adjunct to its bigger vinyl sibling. Stock of new blank cassettes can still be found for sale on-line, and the format has outlived some of those digital successors that suffer from a lack of suitable playback equipment, or software/hardware compatibilities in the digital age.

Even today, in my current music recording setup of MIDI controllers, computers and software like Ableton Live, I use digital plugins based on tape decks, to emulate tape itself, or to replicate early looping effects, or simply to apply some “analogue” limitations to my work.

Next week #5: Home Electronics Kits

 

The Tech in My Life #3: Crystal Radio

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The first radio I owned was a cat’s whisker or crystal receiver, housed in a chic red plastic box. The outward appearance suggested space age technology; the inward reality was a primitive but robust design, and represented my first hands-on experience of electronics.

The advantages of this gadget were portability, ease of use (just a single tuning dial), and no need for a battery or external power source.

The downsides were: limited amplification (no built-in speaker, and the audio was via a single ear-piece – no WiFi or bluetooth in those days!); the need to be connected to an external aerial (a long length of copper wire dangling out of my bedroom window); and it only received medium wave radio signals.

But the worlds it opened up were endless. This was the days before BBC Radio One, and the height of pirate radio stations such as Radio Caroline and “wonderful” Radio London. Listening to the sounds of the psychedelic sixties aged 6 or 7 were formative years in the development of my musical tastes. And thanks to certain atmospheric conditions I could sometimes hear European stations, which sounded very exotic to my young ears.

Next week #4: Reel-to-Reel Tape Deck 

The Tech in My Life #1 – Telstar!

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This week’s blog is the first in a series on key technology that has helped to shape my life. It will be a very personal perspective, and obviously it can’t capture every tech development, interface or environment that I have engaged with. But as I hope to establish, my selections do reveal three recurring themes: information, communication, and music. These threads should become apparent in the coming weeks.

First up is a record, “Telstar”, released by The Tornados in 1962.

I have blogged about this record before, mainly from a musical perspective. But as a tech artefact it also provides other context.

It is probably the first 7″ vinyl record that I can recall hearing – and certainly one of the only pieces of music from my early childhood that remains both familiar and intriguing to this day. Maybe it was also the first record I got to play on the family Dansette myself, so there is a reinforced tactile connection with the record as a “data object” and the gramophone player as a “playback device”. And while the tune itself is relatively simple, the arrangement and recording techniques reveal a lot more depth than a normal pop record. For a start, the choice of electronic keyboards, and the treatment of the electric guitar give it a suitably unworldly atmosphere.

More specifically, and without my realising it at the time, it is probably my earliest experience of musique concrète. I distinctly remember putting my ear as close to the speaker as possible to absorb the opening passage of Joe Meek’s sound effects, tape manipulation and general studio wizardry. What were these strange noises? Why did they fascinate me? Was it really music, or was I hearing something else entirely, like signals from outer space?

Which is exactly the point, as “Telstar” is named after the communications satellite of the same name. Leaving aside Joe Meek’s fascination/obsession with spiritualism and the occult, he was something of an autodidact in the studio – if he needed a particular effect (“what would a satellite signal sound like?”), he would create or improvise from whatever technology was to hand (primitive or otherwise).

In coming weeks, the significance of “Telstar” (the satellite) on my childhood will emerge. But if I was ever invited to appear on “Desert Island Discs”, I’m certain that “Telstar” would be included in my playlist of 8 records.

Next week #2: Goonhilly