I’ve been digitizing some cassette tapes I bought at “the bins” in Portland, Oregon around 2023. A few of the tapes appeared to have recordings of a woman who was having an affair with a man. Both of them are married, and appear to be lawyers. The woman held a tape recorder up to the phone to record their conversations.
The recordings can be really hard to hear. I’ve been playing around with free, open-source noise reduction and other tools in Audacity.
This is just a very short sample of some of the audio from these tapes – run through a quick AI noise reducer, with leveling by me and a generous limiter.
I’m not really into how this sounds. I want a little hiss and a little of the artifacts of the tape present in what we are hearing. I’ll continue to experiment with a good mix as I go through these tapes.
You can can consider this audio as “everything turned up to max” so it isn’t very pleasant to listen to yet, but I find the content compelling.
More on this later. Thanks for reading this first entry in the dang desert.