Hobbies

Dr. Sharon Bannister to the faculty affairs committee

A strongly worded letter #

I had an absolute blast with this tape, not only because of the content, but because of the detective work finding who this person was.

A microcassettes sitting on a desk

In this sixteen and a half minute clip, a woman dictates a letter to what’s presumably an administrative assistant. This strongly worded letter is calling out the university over denying a promotion of a fellow professor that she feels deserves the promotion.

...

A long and winding story

Gold amongst a lot of noise #

One of my latest microcassette lot purchases consists mostly of recorded lectures from an unknown college (maybe Yale). Each tape has the lecture name written on the label; greek, greek #2, hellenistic greek, greek 2nd, futurist, late hellenistic greek.

A microcassettes sitting on a desk

Most of the content on the six tapes is barely audible; a literal Charlie Brown’s teacher. I’m not sure how the person who owned these tapes got any good notes from the recordings.

...

New series of posts

A new hobby #

I spend a fair amount of my freetime researching and experimenting with old technologies to find interesting sounds. While searching, I’ve stumbled across a corner of forgotten life; memories packed away, slowly degrading in basements and storage containers.

These beauties, microcassettes, with hours of dictation, random thoughts, answering machine messages, and candid slices of unscripted life, are all waiting to be listened to and shared.

...