A research team at the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) in Switzerland is developing a technique using X-ray light to digitise recordings from audio tapes that would otherwise be lost to decay.

In 1980, legendary blues artist BB King performed at the Montreux Jazz Festival. A rare recording of this performance exists on magnetic tape that has degraded to such an extent that it can no longer be directly played back using conventional methods.

In our digital world we cannot imagine that the only recording of this performance is stored on a single form of analogue media that cannot be accessed. While magnetic tapes revolutionised sound recording following their invention in the 1920s, this medium for storing audio on long, narrow strips of plastic film consisting of a magnetisable coating is not ideal for long-term archival storage as they degrade and eventually become unplayable.

In an effort to rescue this BB King audio recording, along with similar analogue magnetic media, researchers at the...