Music Has the Right to Children

The title of this column is borrowed from one of my favorite bands, Boards of Canada.

A few days ago, my four-year-old daughter asked me about "that gray thing" sitting atop an unreachable shelf. The gray thing turned out to be an old-school Sony dictation-style cassette recorder--the TCM-313 to be exact. For a (lucky) kid who's handled everything from Disney's Mix Max PVP to a PSP and who refers to little shiny gadgets as "iPods," she had a surprising curiosity about this "mundane" analog device--and the antiquated removable media that went with it.

So I decided it was time to give her a peewee-league tutorial on not only the tape recorder (or even the record player she'd been fiddling around with lately), but on analog audio in general.

It required digging through dusty and forgotten artifacts to find an assortment of store-bought cassettes (The Cars!) and home-brewed mix tapes--some of which were created amidst the mid-'90s "rave" scene, others simply recordings, samples of voices, pretty sounds, and "things." Predictably, she was much more excited by the latter.

The first lesson involved putting the cassette into the player the right way. "Yes, these things have sides--A and B." But before that, we had to use our fingers to wind the slack away from the tapes so that the magnetic tape was taut. After inserting the cassette and closing the lid with a satisfying click, we pressed play.

Music seeped out of the Sony's lo-fi mono speaker; sound quality didn't seem to be an issue (though it did sound much worse than an iPod). I didn't bother to explain the technology involved. For dad, the music was sentimental and satisfying. For the kid, it was just another music machine. That is until I hit fast-forward.

The unit kicked into overdrive and you could hear the music scrubbing along at a rapid pace. It wasn't the same as a digital audio player's choppy and blocky bits. There is latent physical action, a scurrying vibration, not some invisible force packing a memory buffer or the whir of the unseen hard drive.

"You can't skip to the next song?you have to find it, listen for the silence," I explained.

I let her insert a tape that was mostly blank, hit play, and there was silence. "Is it working," she asked?

Yes, but nothing was recorded here--it's blank. So we hit rewind, hit stop, then play, then rewind, stop, play, then rewind, stop, play. Silence. After a while, I skipped the stop part (hitting play was as good as stop, remember?). Cassettes require patience, I said.

"What's the red button for," she asked.

"It's how you record. It's like taking pictures of sounds." I demonstrated recording our voices in a faux interview, then playing it back instantly (after a quick rewind of course--this wasn't a "file" we were dealing with).

She was floored. She began recording (or collecting) sounds by herself--her voice, a dog barking outside, the television. Though she could have done the same with a Creative Zen V Plus, this tired old TCM-313 was infinitely more fun. It didn't matter a bit to her that you'd have to digitize the audio to edit or send it via e-mail.

While she's still getting the hang of the concept of physical rewind and fast-forward (and the inherent problem of recording over previously recorded material), I was proud to arm her with a gadget I once took seriously. When I was a kid (a few years older in age, but younger in my exposure to tech), I equated tape recorders (such as this one) to magic. Despite the presence of DVDs, a PSP, a PS2, and iPods, these days that "gray thing" is the most magical gadget in the house.

Chez moi, cassettes are the ideal medium for my curious child--durable (don't let them near optical media!), modular, and full of surprises. I guess you could say the same about SD-based Disney Mix clips, the real difference being the kid learns about the linearity of old-school media such as tapes and records.

Old-fashioned, yes. More work? No doubt. But I think that every twenty-first century kid should grasp what came before digital. I guess for the same reasons we should encourage children to write letters instead of typing them, understanding analog audio will help them appreciate the digital world that engulfs them today. To me, it would be a sad thing for something as basic as recoding your chld's voice to get lost in the electronic shuffle.

PS: New parents (and parents to be), if you own an MP3 player armed with a voice recorder, do yourself a favor: record your baby's first sounds. Record your children's voices, talking, singing, laughing, and being plain silly. Interview your kids. You'll be astonished when you listen to these files later. I recently encountered a series of MP3s in iTunes generically ID'ed as "VOICE_040102, "VOICE_040125" and so on, and after listening to my child's voice from a couple years back, I value these files more than any other tracks in my bloated library.