Categories
Media and the arts Society and culture

Rewinding the times

January 11, 2023

Audio cassettes are back!

Maybe you used them in your childhood? Maybe you gave your first teenage crush a carefully selected playlist recorded onto one or maybe you just recently learned about them through social media – audio cassette tapes.

Yes, they’re back. In fact, some argue they’ve never went away. The interest in cassette tapes has been growing continuously in the past decade as indicated by rising sales numbers. The music data provider Luminate recorded a jump from 173,000 in 2020 to 343,000 sold cassettes in the United States in 2021. In the UK, cassette sales rose to more than 185,000 units, the highest number the British Phonographic Industry has recorded since 2003.

DIY and independent music driving resurgence

But why are cassette tapes a thing again? Isn’t the sound quality inferior to all other music formats? There is more than one answer to this question as cassette tapes are not only meant for playback but also can be easily recorded on. For many Do-it-yourself musicians in independent music scenes this makes the format the perfect choice for music they record at home. Many so-called bedroom producers who make Ambient, Noise, Hip Hop, Metal or Punk music have grown to favour cassette tapes for their releases over vinyl records.

Although a lot of musicians and music enthusiasts still view vinyl records as the more authentic format for music, the peaked interest in records has caused production costs to skyrocket. Not only is the production of vinyl records expensive but also restrictive as pressing plants ask for a minimum order of at least a few hundred pressings that quickly add up to a few thousand dollars for producing a release. A big investment and risk for amateur musicians and label operators if they don’t sell enough records to break even with the costs. On top of this, waiting periods to produce a vinyl release can last up to twelve months or longer.

Producing cassette tapes is easier, quicker and less expensive. Pressing plants such as Duplication.ca or National Audio Company ask for lower or no minimum number for cassette orders. Cassettes can be recorded at home and the artwork for their paper inserts, so-called j-cards, can single-handedly be printed on a consumer printer or at a copy shop. However, for many cassette tapes are not an audio format per se anymore. Have you ever brought a beautiful seashell home after a trip to the beach? Cassette tapes function in a similar fashion for concerts. They are material mementos that people can pick up at a local gig to support an artist they liked. Compared to vinyl records, cassettes are much cheaper and smaller and so the threshold for picking one up is lower. Like the seashell, they often end up as decoration on people’s shelves especially as many people do not own cassette players anymore.

Cassette tapes produced during the 1980s and 90s by the likes of TDK, Maxell and Sony where utilitarian, had high-grade magnetic chrome tape inside them and were not necessarily pretty to look at. Cassette tapes nowadays in contrast are produced in vibrant colours such as neon green or gold glitter and feature elaborate artwork – they look nice on shelves, Instagram posts and TikTok videos. However, most of them are equipped with sonically inferior ferric tape. In a nutshell, high fidelity audio is out, and premium visual appearance is in which means the cassette tape has experienced a so-called visual turn. As most music consumers don’t own cassette players anymore it is common for cassette releases now to come with a piece of paper that features a download code that can be used to download the Mp3 version of the music or get streaming access. The majority of independent music releases on cassette are distributed on the website Bandcamp that allows artists and labels to upload and sell their music digitally as well as merchandise such as t-shirts, tote bags and cassette tapes.

Media artefact
"As most music consumers don’t own cassette players anymore it is common for cassette releases now to come with a piece of paper that features a download code that can be used to download the Mp3 version of the music or get streaming access."
Dr Benjamin Duester

So, some people only use new cassettes as novelty display items but there is still a significant number of music enthusiasts who regularly listen to tapes. For them, the characteristic hiss and sound of cassettes adds to the listening experience for genres such as Ambient, Dreampop, Lofi or Shoegaze music that already use washed-out soundscapes. Listening to cassettes is not necessarily a lesser experience for them than listening to the music on Spotify but just a different and interesting way to experience music. There is this idea of media archaeology: the more media and technology humanity produces, the more of it becomes lost or obsolete. But researching and engaging with things that historically understood are obsolete can still be an enriching and inspiring experience. Cassette tapes are in this sense culturally related to classic cars or fireplaces in modern homes – yes, they’re technically not necessary anymore but still can be a lot of fun to interact with and hold the opportunity to teach us important aspects about how we engage with the material world that constantly surrounds us. 

Author

Dr Benjamin Duester is a Resident Adjunct at the Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research where he is investigating the cultural and economic significance of cassette tapes for current DIY music scenes and the political ecology of music’s materiality in the 21st century.

As a cultural sociologist, Benjamin works in the fields of popular music, materiality studies and political ecology. His previous work includes research for local governments on cultural infrastructure and live music planning and policy and a transnational national study of current circuits of cassette production, distribution and consumption across Australia, Japan and the USA.

Follow Ben on Twitter

Share
Share
Share

You might also like

How visualising change can help business leaders increase impact

We often hear the adage ‘I’ll believe it when I see it.’ But how can this sentiment help those trying to imagine a different future? For business leaders wanting to innovate –and bring others on that journey – visualising the path ahead can be a way to better identify what needs to change and how to get there.

Read more
Cotter Dam

Can Australia be drought-proofed?

Water is critical to life and jobs, and large infrastructure projects tend to sway voters at the polling booth. Paired together, it’s easy to understand why the New Bradfield Scheme remains an issue for Queensland and Australia.

Read more
Categories
Society and culture

How do Queenslanders respond to a disaster? Let’s look at the data

January 11, 2023

Every year, Queensland Fire and Emergency Services deals with a myriad of natural disasters and emergencies that impact communities across the state. Understanding where, when, and how people move during a disaster is critical to an informed response strategy.

A data-driven approach to response, preparedness, and resilience

Have you ever wondered how emergency services providers and first responders quantify and monitor human movements during an emergency evacuation order or lockdown? The Relational Insights Data Lab teamed up with the Queensland Fire and Emergency Services (QFES) to help them answer these questions. The opportunity to help QFES fill critical data gaps during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic was part of a larger goal of establishing an all-of-government data-ecosystem that would utilise multiple government departments datasets and share insights.

In a nutshell, a data-ecosystem is a platform that enables multiple organisations to combine data and share insights in a mutually beneficial manner by building and harnessing economies of scale and facilitating a collaborative network of collective intelligence. Data ecosystems can help address the siloing of information. This is not a new problem and it’s a phenomenon that critical bodies like the QFES are not immune to.

QFES conducted an exploratory audit which revealed gaps around adequately quantifying human movement and patterns of  behaviours during disasters and relied on sparse and siloed data from their own staff, the Department of Transport and Main Roads, Queensland Police, evacuation centres, and the Australian Red Cross. Therefore, it became our role at the Relational Insights Data Lab (RIDL) to assess whether the DSpark mobility data (a nationally representative and fully anonymised longitudinal telecommunications dataset that extends back to 2017 and with a recency of 60-72hrs) could fill critical information gaps and improve disaster response, preparedness, and build resilience.

RIDL and QFES decided to use the September 2019 fires in Peregian Beach and the COVID-19 lockdowns as case studies and came up with five seemingly basic, but critically important questions:

  1. Where do people go when an evacuation order is given?
  2. How long do people take to respond once an evacuation or lockdown order is announced?
  3. How far do they travel when evacuating? (How far do people travel when a lockdown order is in place?)
  4. What routes were travelled when the evacuation order was given? (Do people heed recommendations?)
  5. How long does it take to analyse the data and is there a possibility of real-time application?

The pilot determined that securely accessing DSpark data and developing predictive models would provide opportunities for QFES to make more informed, data-driven decisions to better prepare and respond to future emergencies. To provide examples of how we answered the above questions using the DSpark data, we’ll examine how people moved during the September 2019 Peregian fires and how far people travelled during the initial COVID-19 lockdown in March 2020 compared to the delta variant related lockdown in August 2021.

Peregian Beach Sept 10, 2019.
The Peregian Beach Fires in 2019

Two thirds or 66% of evacuees during a disaster are unaccounted for, or are data-invisible. The question goes begging as to what would you do and where would you go if/when an evacuation order is announced?

The QFES recommendation is to be proactive and have a plan in place, leave the evacuated area quickly and safely and, if possible, stay with family, friends, or neighbours, and preferably ones with a good Wi-Fi connection. Evacuation centres are strategically located to assist those displaced. The QFES wanted to know whether people were in fact heeding evacuation orders, where they went, and if evacuation centres were optimally located, were they being utilised and for how long.

To answer these questions, the RIDL team built a dashboard that geospatially quantified and visualised population movements in an easy-to-digest and actionable manner. Using the dashboard insights, we found that on the first day of the Peregian fires, that 96 people more than average stayed in the Noosa Evacuation Centre area, and they stayed there 3.5 hours longer than average.

Concluding that more people stayed longer lengths of time in areas with evacuation centres when the evacuation order was given, indicated compliance and/or appropriate placement. Additional year-on-year analysis reveals that in 2020, during the initial phases of COVID-19 there was a 4% increase in residents at home during the fire period (September 9th-11th) and a 46% decrease in visitor numbers.

Looking at how long people took to respond in the context of the Peregian Beach fires, our analysis found people started evacuating on the first day of the fires as directed, on the 9th of September. The dashboard heatmap and graph visualised the dip in residents on day two of the fire after evacuation orders were in place. Using filter functions when comparing periods of the day, it is possible to quantify that there was a 49.5% decline in residents at home relative to the previous morning, signifying that evacuation orders were promptly heeded. Thus, demonstrating that our analysis definitively showed the movement of people in affected areas, lengths of stay, and how people responded to evacuation and lockdown orders.

Did people adhere to COVID-19 lockdown orders and reduce their travel ?

When establishing the duration and strictness of the lockdown orders during the first eighteen months of the pandemic, Queensland policy makers and public health officials wanted to understand whether their messaging was clear, and orders were being followed.

Agencies wanted to understand compliance and/or pandemic fatigue. The World Health Organisation defines pandemic fatigue as the demotivation to follow recommended protective behaviours, emerging gradually over time and affected by a number of emotions, experiences, and perceptions. The DSpark data helped RIDL and the agencies understand if Queenslanders were losing their will to comply over time. We measured the magnitude of, and distance travelled by, people to five major shopping centres around the greater Brisbane area to see if this:

  • changed during lockdowns,
  • whether this change was consistent or varied across subsequent lockdowns, and,
  • whether Queenslanders were exhibiting signs of compliance or pandemic fatigue.

The animation below visualises mobility data presented as a heatmap with the colour density illustrating the magnitude of people seen at Chermside shopping centre based on the geographic spread of their home locations.

To standardise the pre, post, and across lockdown comparisons, we compared the same Wednesdays in March across 2019, 2020 and 2021, and in doing so it becomes immediately clear that during the first COVID-19 lockdown in March 2020, both the magnitude and distance people travelled contracted dramatically.

However, when we undertake the same analysis during the July – August 2021 lockdown which was ordered due to cases of the new and highly contagious delta variant, we see an even more severe contraction, suggesting that despite it being the fourth lockdown in 2021, Queenslanders were even more compliant than they were during the previous lockdowns.

To establish further context, we honed in on the Easter 2021 lockdown which was surrounded by ‘less austere’ messaging and focused on the day of the contraction and examined the number of people and median distance travelled to Chermside on equivalent Wednesdays going back two months in 2021 and 2019 when there were no lockdowns.

Despite the drop being less pronounced when compared to other lockdowns, this also showed us that the number of people dropped significantly on the lockdown Wednesday (week 13) in 2021. The distance travelled to the shopping centre also dropped from a median distance of 3km at the longest median distance to 2km on lockdown day.

The pale grey section indicates when the first lockdown in 2020 occurred and thinner red vertical shaded sections indicate when lockdowns occurred in 2021.

The ability to fill the current data gaps by quantifying peoples movement during emergency situations is key to improving disaster response and preparedness. The data-ecosystem pilot demonstrated that telecommunications data brought to life in an actionable dashboard, like the one built by our team at RIDL can bridge some of the data silos and help fill the data and evidence gaps faced by QFES to improve disaster responses and assist in the recovery, rebuild and reconnection of resilient Queensland communities after a disaster.

With another summer disaster season upon Queensland, please consider putting a disaster evacuation plan in place. The QFES provides considerable advice and suggestions to help you do so.

Author

Rhetta ChappellRhetta Chappell is a Data Scientist in the Relational Insights Data Lab at Griffith University. Rhetta designs and builds intuitive and innovative solutions that enable users to make data-driven decisions using quantitative and qualitative analysis methods. Rhetta has a background in data analytics, statistical standards, data collection, reporting and survey design. Originally from Canada, she previously worked for the National Centre for Vocational Education Research as researcher and project officer.

Share
Share
Share

You might also like

Gorbachev

Gorbachev was an environmentalist

Much has been written, and rightly so, about the political impact, significance and legacy of Mikhail Gorbachev (1931-2022). However, in addition to his grand and historic roles in changing the shape of Europe and Russian, and bringing to an end a Cold War that threatened to end in nuclear annihilation and mutually assured destruction, Gorbachev was also an environmentalist.

Read more
Charcuterie Board

Is this the end of the deli?

Processed meats are often publicised to be as bad as smoking? You are not doing the same harm as a cigarette when you reach for a charcuterie board, but it is definitely far from harmless.

Read more