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Happy Friday, colleagues! I'm digitizing some oral history cassettes and I've come across a very interesting sound on one of the tapes. This is a continual stretchy creaky sound that occurs for about a half-second every 3 seconds. At first, I suspected it to be a result of some variant of soft binder syndrome, but both baking and cold playback has had no effect at all on the sound. Also, I am not hearing any "squeal" from within the cassette deck, only this strange sound coming through the amplified playback. The tape is not shedding oxide. After playing through the tape, I've discovered the sound occurs for only about 7 minutes in the recording, and begins immediately after a break in the recording. Also, the way the sound trails off when it stops seems to indicate to me something that was recorded inadvertently by the microphone, perhaps a sound from the tape recorder itself. There is a subtle sort of "room presence" that the sound has at the very end occurring along with a sound like something being dropped. All of this has now has me thinking the sound is something in the original recording rather than an artifact being introduced during playback. The cassette is an off-brand, brown oxide variant. The original recording is from 1975. Below is a link to a one minute sample, towards the end of the sound. Pay particular attention near the end of the sample when the sound trails off. If anyone has any ideas as to what this sound may be, I'd be most interested! https://jh.box.com/s/kvsaork509ckuo4h54v47cxappwve4aa Thanks, Tim -- Timothy Wisniewski, M.L.I.S. Visual Materials Archivist Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions 5801 Smith Avenue, Suite 235 Baltimore, MD 21209