The two-spool cassette was released in 1963, the brain-child of Philips engineer Lou Ottens. That same year, Douglas Engelbart invented the computer mouse, the BBC released the first episode of Doctor Who and John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Before the cassette, there were electromagnetic tapes and transcription discs. After the cassette came compact discs (CDs) and the MP3. Now, sound is transmitted through bytes, packets of data hurtling through cables.

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My father is the great archivist of our family. There are thousands of pictures from my childhood of my brother and me. First days of school, every angle of our pudgy faces, the slick sheen on my brother’s forehead immortalized on the screen. There are fewer photos from my dad’s childhood, but he has taken it upon himself to begin digitizing the family photo albums, which stretch back decades. Every now and then, a film photograph will circulate in the large family group chat — my dad with my great-grandparents on leave from his military service; my grandmother looking up from a stairwell; my dad and his sisters with bowl cuts, impossibly young.

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First used in the 1920s, transcription discs were designed to be played on a phonograph, made with lacquered aluminum. Communication Prof. Neil Verma notes that archivists don’t know what is on the tapes until they are played, and ones originally made in the 1930s were often only made to be played a few times.

“There are more than you can digitize in a lifetime,” Verma says. “So this is one of the challenges of preservation — how do you decide what to digitize? Where can it live? And once it is digitized, is it really safe?”

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As a child, I loved the word “obsolescence” because it sounded like air. Eventually, I moved past its sonic qualities, learning what it really meant. In eighth grade, I found out about planned obsolescence — even more depressing than the original term. If manufacturers design goods with a finite lifespan, they incentivize customers to purchase again. Things are not built to last. Anyone who says differently is trying to sell something.

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The first time I had friends over after the pandemic, someone said, “You never told us your dad was so cool.” This had never occurred to me before — the vinyls lining the bookshelves, the dearly beloved sound system that he had shipped over when we moved from Taiwan to Malaysia, his cherry red bass guitar tucked into the corner of our living room.

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Years ago, he set up an iPad to record my grandfather telling the oral history of our family — people who died decades before I was born, the first generation to arrive in Taiwan, the cousins nobody has met. I tried watching it once with my dad, years ago, and very quickly grew bored. I don’t remember what I left to do.

My dad can’t find the videos anymore. The idea of something that was meant to last forever vanishing into the digital void bothers me. It bothers him, too, more than he lets on.

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The last recording of my maternal grandfather’s voice is saved in my voice memos. He’s singing with his friends in Japanese, the language they first learned in school. Age warbles their voices. I recorded it from behind a sliding door. When my brother walked past, he looked at me like I was crazy, hiding in a corner, recording on my phone.

Sound comes from vibrations. A voice echoes, and then is gone.

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It’s easy to be bleak. It’s easier to believe in an irredeemable world. But my dad’s cassettes and digital audio tapes have lasted well into the 21st century, despite decades of use. Although they aren’t manufactured anymore, they were not designed to fall apart. Yes, cassettes will break eventually. But that is more because of love, the comfort of listening again and again.

Some things will break eventually, but that does not mean they were designed to break. Some things wear down because humans cling to what they love most. We want to hear the voices of our loved ones. We want to revisit the joy of being 20 and buying our favorite jazz artist’s newest CD. We want to remember what life was like the first time we heard a certain song.

Film fades. Vinyls and cassettes wear down. Memory remains a fickle thing.