麻豆社

1 July 1979 brought a revolution in personalised music consumption. No longer did listening have to happen either communally or in the dignified privacy of one鈥檚 home. On this day came a new phenomenon: a public cocoon; the ability to isolate yourself within a crowd; to block out of the world by carrying a concert with you in your own very ears. From this day, your physical surroundings were no longer a limitation on the soundtrack of your life.

The Walkman was born.

The idea had been brewing for a while. Two years earlier, a German-Brazilian inventor called Andreas Pavel patented a contraption called the Stereobelt, which did what it said on the tin. Pavel took the notion to Yamaha and Philips, but was told that no-one would ever want to wear headphones to listen to music in public spaces. And so the global success fell into the hands of another company.

The cofounder of Sony, Masaru Ibuka, had to go on a lot of business trips, but he also loved listening to music. What could be done? He asked his engineers to invent a solution, so that he could listen to opera as he crossed the Pacific. That solution was found in the hands of journalists, who already had specialist tape machines that could record audio on the go. All that really changed when Sony鈥檚 portable device went into mass-production was that the primary purpose was to entertain, rather than capture. Original ideas for the name included 鈥淪oundabout鈥� and 鈥淪towaway鈥�, but Sony soon settled on Walkman, with a logo showing little running shoes on the serifs of the As.

The early Walkman TPS-L2 was as bulky as a paperback book and as heavy as a tin of beans. The foam-clad headphones were as face-engulfing as earmuffs. The batteries died after a couple of hours, and you had to carry a biro everywhere you went in case of emergency tape spooling. Owning one of the first Walkmen mean parting with 30,000 yen, the equivalent today of about 拢400. And yet demand rose astronomically, until the Walkman craze hit fever pitch.

In 1980 the Wall Street Journal called it 鈥渙ne of the hottest new status symbols around鈥�. Soon came cheaper models and waterproof models that could be used in the swimming pool. In 1983, Sony released a model that was no bigger than a cassette case and by 1984, the world had its first CD Walkman. By the time Sony retired their portable cassette line in 2010, more than 400 million Walkmans had been sold worldwide.

The cassette tape original remained the design classic, with its analogue audio technology still unbeatable when it comes to listening in high fidelity on the move. Steve Reich used to perform his seminal piece of tape music, New York Counterpoint, using a Walkman. Clarinettists could simply walk on stage, plug it in, and off they went.

This is one of 100 significant musical moments explored by 麻豆社 Radio 3鈥檚 Essential Classics as part of Our Classical Century, a 麻豆社 season celebrating a momentous 100 years in music from 1918 to 2018. Visit bbc.co.uk/ourclassicalcentury to watch and listen to all programmes in the season.

This is an excerpt from a recording of New York Counterpoint by Evan Ziporyn.

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