My First Sony Experience is with my Sony Walkman

by Noemi Lardizabal-Dado

One of the most interesting and exciting birthday presents I got was from my dad during my 23rd birthday, in 1981. Daddy just came from a business trip from Japan and thought of giving me the latest craze. Tearing open the gift wrapper revealed a box with an unfamiliar name on it: Sony Walkman. My dad explained to me that this was the latest in technology from Japan, and that it can play cassette tapes. I was really surprised to see that cassette tape players came in such compact form now, and since I had a fairly large collection of dance music tapes, I was thrilled with my new present.

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My memory now fails me as I try to recall the model number of my first Sony Walkman. I can still remember how it looked like though. It was a black boxy gadget with the standard buttons you need to navigate through a cassette tape - play, stop, fast forward, and rewind. Unlike the Walkmans my kids used in the 90’s, mine didn’t have an AM/FM receiver or a record option. It was simply that: a portable device that allows me listen to my cassette tapes wherever I went. What a relief it was to own the walkman. Before I got the Walkman, playing cassette tapes meant using my chunky stereo system or that bulky stand alone tape player. Imagine the scenario if I had to carry around my stereo system. It would be too large to carry around and of course I would need electricity to plug my stereo and listen to my music. Owning my very own Sony Walkman was the coolest gadget on the planet in the early eighties.

Technology might have been simple back then, without all the extra features everyone is used to today, but you have to remember that the Walkman was quite the novelty at the time. The Walkman created a new global culture of “enjoying music any where and any time”. I brought mine with me wherever I went, and I would use it to listen to songs that reminded me of the happiest and most meaningful moments of my life. One of those songs was “How Deep is Your Love” by the Beegees, which my boyfriend (now my husband) and I decided was our theme song. Locking our hands together, we sat by the sunken garden of the UP Diliman campus and watched the sunset as we wove dreams of being together forever and having babies one day. Amidst the Beegees “How Deep is Your Love” , time stood still for lovestruck us.

The Walkman, however, was it was most useful to me when I would go jogging after work. I remember the sensation of the bass thudding through the padded earphones. It made me feel as if I were living in a world that was entirely my own, a world where anything was possible. Again, I would have my trusty Beegees cassette playing, usually to the songs “Staying Alive” and “Saturday Night Fever”.

My Walkman became my number one companion when my ex-boyfriend/husband and I broke up for several months. The break-up devastated me; during the first week I played nothing but sad songs from The Carpenters, especially “End of the World.” I was grateful that the Walkman came with earphones; at the time I was sharing a room in a boarding house and I didn’t want to disturb my roommates with my depressing choice of music. After a while I grew tired of moping, so I resumed my afternoon jogging ritual. I’d put on the most upbeat songs I had on my Walkman and it helped me tune out my sadness and set the pace for how fast I would jog.

In an age where everyone owns an mp3 player, my story doesn’t sound very unusual; I’m sure that a lot of people feel similar when they tune out the world to their own music today. But it’s amazing how nobody ever gives much thought to its ancestor, the great grandfather of all portable music players. Sometimes I wonder if kids these days even got to experience what it was like to carry around a chunkier version of their iPods and a clunky, noisy set of tapes to go along with it. Even if it was not as compact as today’s music players, the Sony Walkman definitely gave significance in my life just like the Sony’s World’s First Noise Canceling Portable Music Player, which gives me tranquility and joy as I relax with my music.