Measuring Tapes

The Tower of Babel is another story high, thanks to the fledgling audio cassette industry. No longer content to simply reel out taped renditions of a Rolling Stones goldie or a Bing Crosby oldie, the new versions of the handy cassettes are sounding out on everything from money management to marriage counseling, evangelical sermons to menopausal symptoms.

Travelers to London, Paris and Rome, for example, can now lock in (with $2.95) on a current Pan American promotional gimmick: tape-recorded walking tours of the cities (each narrated by a properly accented guide), as well as taped auto tours of the French and English countrysides. The tourist willing to lug a cassette player around Europe can wander the highways and byways for hours, all the while picking up inside dope like Montparnasse was a refuge for struggling artists like Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald in the years following World War I.

For the Lonely. Other, more anatomical information, is available in the three-cassette offering called "Human Sexuality," produced by Creative Cassettes Corp. ($19.98 the set). Five doctors deliver a more-than-four-hour symposium on topics such as sexual intercourse, masturbation, aphrodisiacs, frigidity and homosexuality. "Masturbation," one oracle advises, "is harmful only if you think it's harmful. Physically, it's not harmful. It's just lonely."

For those interested in making it in the more traditional sense, the Success Motivation Institute of Waco, Texas (dedicated to "motivating people to their full potential") offers cassette lectures on the dynamics of supervision, sales training and becoming financially independent. There is also a three-part family program, covering such topics as "Handling Frustration and Conflict," "What It Means to Become a Woman" and "Keep Your Eye On Your Attitudes." Among SMI's customers are several members of the Kansas City Chiefs--after winning the 1970 Super Bowl, the Chiefs failed to make the playoffs in the season just ended. Instructional Dynamics in Chicago has a four-part "Mental Health Info-Pak" ($6.95 each) which offers hints on "making marriage work" and "constructive aggression."

A Talking Book. The more culturally oriented can find cassette recordings almost everywhere of actors and poets such as Richard Burton and Dylan Thomas reading famous plays and poems, but the French have gone a soupcon further. Issued in Paris this fall is France's first "talking book," a cassette volume of 22 works of the Mexican poet Octavio Paz (in Spanish, with a French translation included). Also included are elaborately illustrated pages of handmade paper, on which the verses themselves are printed. Only 301 copies were produced; each retails for $300.

Car owners and would-be mechanics, not to mention drivers suffering from the high cost of auto repairs, may find solace in the automotive Tune-Up-Tape by Coursette System Inc. Equipped with the tape, the company claims, "someone who has never even changed a tire can now successfully tune his car the first time he tries." The package includes an engine diagram, tool and parts list, service sticker and window decal ("Owner-Tuned"), all for $9.95, considerably less than a similar job at the local garage.

General Cassette Corporation in Phoenix makes custom tapes; voices, sound crews and scripts, if necessary, all provided by the company. They have already produced, among others, a series of special exercises for golfers, beauty hints for teen-age girls, Bible stories for children, and Walter

Cronkite describing points of interest at national parks and historic and military shrines. For the nervous city dweller, Leisure Data Inc. of Manhattan offers 20 minutes of the barks and snarls of an extremely annoyed German shepherd. The tape is designed to be turned on when a potential intruder nears. Time-Life Audio is preparing a new monthly "cassette magazine" called The Executive Voice, containing interviews with top business leaders, which will be available to subscribers for $80 a year.

Still in the works is a series of go-to-sleep cassettes, to be produced by New York Psychiatrist Abraham Weinberg. For confirmed insomniacs, these lullaby cassettes may come in handy. For others, instant sleep is all but guaranteed, simply by turning on the first of those lectures on a walking tour of Paris.

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