Cassette tapes were originally developed by Lou Ottens and his team at the Dutch technology company Phillips in 1963 and they became hugely popular as a format for pre-recorded music. They were also available as ‘blank’ tapes, which allowed for personalised home recordings of music. This home recording functionality of cassette recorders was deployed by members of the Scottish-Pakistani community who used them as an audio messaging system to communicate with their relatives abroad. Tapes were relatively cheap, re-recordable, and in many instances provided a solution to problems with literacy, in particular for many women from a lower socio-economic background who were unable to read or write letters that would have been penned in Urdu - the national language of Pakistan. Cassettes allowed them to record messages in their own languages which included Punjabi, Pothwari, Pahari, and Mirpuri allowing for their voices to be heard directly and literally.

Messages were recorded on a variety of tape lengths (the most commonly used being the ‘C60’ allowing 30 minutes of audio to be recorded per side) and the cassettes were sent between families either via the postal system or in the relatively rare instances when a family member or trusted friend would be visiting from abroad, they would be delivered by hand. Cassettes would be listened to individually or collectively by the intended receivers, with messages being recorded and returned similarly. By the late 1980s however, advances in telecoms technology made the use of cassette tapes communication obsolete.

Surviving ‘tape letter’ cassettes are quite rare as many of the cassettes that were intended for safe-keeping by older members of the community were re-recorded over by younger family members glad to have the opportunity of a free cassette. Multiple recordings on the same cassette, with the subsequent degradation in audio quality, meant that many were unlistenable and also discarded. Despite the rarity, some cassettes do exist, and the Tape Letters Scotland project has sourced a number of these surviving cassettes allowing an insight into this pragmatic practice of recording messages on magnetic tape.

Some cassettes were intended for individual listening, and others for group listening. Some contained intimate messages between lovers, some contained messages between parents and their sons or daughters. Some were recorded in secret, some contained domestic chatter on the weather and an unfamiliar climate. They all contain deeply human stories though, and these ‘tape letters’ can be considered significant artefacts both as objects and as oral/aural moments in a crucial time for the migrant Pakistani community. They were recorded “in the moment, and of the moment” and are sonographic snapshots providing an unvarnished insight into private familial spheres of life at the time.