This year LFK starts making sound recordings using a tape recorder. The first machine is large and heavy, requiring two men to move it. Therefore usually the machine stays in the yard - in a bus - while a long cable stretches to a microphone indoors. Want to hear your own voice? Why not, just walk to the bus... The first tapes must have been used ones, from radio, when handed over to the folklorists. Still all this was a giant step forward compared to phonograph

            

With time the technology was improved, both recorders and buses become smaller, the compact cassettes appear (the last reel tape was recorded in 1979, although some accidental recording can also be found later). Some examples of the machines used.

Andrejs Krumins Jauza 5, lamp recorder
 
Kometa 201 of the Folklore Institute, two motor lamp recorder with electromechanical control
 
Smaller size, the same principle - "Reporter"
 
Iz-302 of the Folklore Department, simple but reliable cassette recorder


But the machines are not the main point of research, though. Based on the thesis that folklore is a living social phenomenon soviet bureaucrats invented modern folklore  a decade before American folklorists discovered it, with the only difference that this was labelled "soviet" and had to bear fixed ideas. Read more about it