“We Should Have Had a Historian”: Live Television and the Accident of the Moon Landing Tapes

Forty years after the first moon landing in 1969, National Aeronautics and Space Administration announced that it had likely recycled the tapes containing the original footage of the landing. Although the mission was a monumental event viewed by millions of people around the world, the production and handling of the recorded materials was a matter of little concern to more than a small group of employees, historians, and space enthusiasts. This article argues that despite the fact that the erasure of these archival materials was accidental, it was not an accident per se but rather a fulfillment of a logic designed into the apparatus of magnetic tape recording from its very inception, and therefore a generative event for the media archeologist. By evoking histories and theories of broadcast and magnetic recording, I argue that erasure is a process that discloses networks of economic, cultural, material, and aesthetic discourses and interests.

Recording “Foggy Mountain Breakdown”

Flatt and Scruggs went into Herzog Studios in Cincinnati, Ohio, on December 11, 1949, to record his recently composed tune “Foggy Mountain Breakdown,” the first instrumental recording for Flatt and Scruggs. E. T. (Bud) Herzog had started the studio a few years earlier, attracting name artists such as Patti Page and Hank Williams. Producer Murray Nash used the new medium of magnetic tape recording at the sessions, almost certainly using several microphones to achieve a widely praised sound. Nash, from the Midwest, had quickly gotten up to speed on the record industry, which was growing quickly following the end of the union ban on live recording and with the postwar growth of the economy.

Electroacoustic Music At CLAEM: A Pioneer Studio in Latin America

During the 1950s and ’60s, many composers began exploring the possibilities provided by commercially available magnetic tape recording and electronically produced sound. In Latin America, the most successful early electroacoustic studio was hosted at the Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales (CLAEM), part of the Torcuato Di Tella Institute in Buenos Aires, Argentina. This article chronicles the eight years of existence of CLAEM's Laboratorio de música electrónica (1964–1971), and its role in the training of composers hailing from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Chile, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, Peru, Puerto Rico, Uruguay, and the United States. This historical account of pioneering Latin American electroacoustic music provides insight into the aesthetic and technical developments that earned the laboratory at CLAEM a place in the regional and transnational world of contemporary music making and demonstrates the crucial role of locality in the adoption, consumption, and rearticulation of international musical models.

A Facile Approach of Fabricating Ultra-Thin Wear Resistant Si/SiNx/C Overcoats for Magnetic Tape Recording Heads

Magnetic tape recording is one of the oldest data storage technologies, and it is still used today due to its low cost and long data storage life. Magnetic tape recording is a contact recording technology, where a thin flexible magnetic tape medium is pulled across an Al2O3/TiC (AlTiC) recording head surface at a high velocity while in direct physical contact with each other. As a result, one of the inherent problems faced in magnetic tape recording systems is an increase in the magnetic spacing over time with prolonged usage, due to continuous wear of the tape bearing head surface, which in turn leads to a deterioration of the magnetic readback signal [1]. The increase in the magnetic spacing at the head-tape interface can be due to several factors, such as pole tip recession (PTR), accumulation of wear debris on the head and surface roughness of the head and tape medium. Out of these factors, PTR is a major contributor to the magnetic spacing loss, due to a higher rate of wear of the softer magnetic read and write poles at the head-tape interface [2].