Category: Cassettes

Music on home micros ZX Spectrum 1980s from Aphex Twin Richard D James

Music on the ZX Spectrum. Aphex Twin (Richard D James) in an interview in this documentary, at 2 minutes 24 seconds to 3:26 (link below).

“Early influences were more hardware in nature. An early touchstone was the game loading sound for the early home computer, the Spectrum ZX81.”

Says Richard:

“People who had them must have spent hours listening to hat. Its more extreme than any extreme noise music. In time you got to know the sound really well: “Ooh, good bit coming up here.”

It was always the best , sonically, when it tried to load a picture. It would be “lryurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrghh!”

I always wanted to make my music sound like a game! A danceable version of a Spectrum game.”

WTF is a Data Cassette

Micro Arts data cassettes
Micro Arts data cassettes, case design Geoff Davis
Micro Arts data cassettes
Micro Arts data cassettes – MA1 master

This came up at the Leicester 8bit exhibition. I was chatting to a musician (there was an audio installation from Virtual State), and he wondered if data cassettes were CD quality.

A data cassette is a stream of information, encoded as beeps, which are bits in on/off mode, this is then much speeded up to fit on a tape. So the audio is just zeroes and ones. This is read by an audio decoder in the micro, to convert the audio beeps back into bits.

This was also how micro programmers worked, saving to tape. This was not a pro game shop, I just started up Micro Arts at home in Clapham.

Data cassette deck - now museum piece
Data cassette deck – now museum piece

Older readers will recall the noisy screech of modems. Even older readers will remember these tapes and the tape decks.

However, the cassettes last a long time, when I opened the cardboard box in which stored Micro Arts materials, around 2019, all the tapes loaded perfectly into a PC Spectrum emulator. Apparently, as I moved about a lot (I’ve lived in many places), the oxide doesn’t get settled, so they are more reliable. That’s weird. Pretty long term when you think about it.