I decided to look more into tape and cassette as a medium to critically reflect on theorists and writers further than my current readings. To take my reflections as far as possible. I found this interesting essay that discusses Tape and the ideas behind the human alike abilities of tape and how tape can be understood In different ways and what tape offers that other technology does. Here are some quotes and reflections that brought interest from reading.
The difference between analogue and digital recording resolves in a difference between a continuously varying waveform, in its various physical analogies and a discontinuously-encoded form.
Something I’ve always understood about analogue to digital recording and playback is that waveforms are what is played in analogue and digital are the same but converted into ones and zeros. There is more ease with analogue distortion due to this, as it’s not a linear one or zero. I think this does create a more human idea of tape when one understands this analogue perspective within it.
The idea that one might be able to read off sound from the scorings in a phonograph record might always have been a fantasy, but gramophone records do allow for a certain kind of quasi-legibility, sounds of greater amplitude resulting for example in visibly deeper and wider indentations; djs are able to drop the stylus very accurately on to a particular point in a piece of music using this kind of legibility. Tape offers much less opportunity for this, since the dispositions of the magnetic particles on the tape are not visible, meaning that one length of tape looks and feels pretty much identical to another. One of the reasons that magnetic recording was not adopted as quickly by editors of film sound after the War was precisely that it did not offer a visible set of undulations on the film print as the optical soundtrack did (Morton 2004, 126).
I think that the idea that tape has recordings embedded but blind to our eyesight is another interesting point. Vinyl has obvious grooves and one can easily distinguish the separations between audio and tracks. Tape is all magnetic and more difficult but it’s still there. What does this mean for the user and the experience? Ideas of letting go and giving things time to breathe become apparent in my thoughts.
Record ‘scratching’ allows one to interfere with the reproduction of a recorded signal; tape editing allows one to start again and produce a new signal entirely. As N. Katherine Hayles observes, ‘whereas the phonograph produced objects that could be consumed only in their manufactured form, magnetic tape allowed the consumer to be a producer as well’ (Hayles 1999, 210).
This is something I’ve read in other sources that tape was the first time a consumer could also become a producer and engineer all at once. Due to the nature of tape being re-recordable and erasable this created an unwanted outcome. Giving the listener control, as well as a playback device and recording device. Brian Eno also discusses this as the time when he felt that he could create music by non-musicians.
The disk is a fossil record; the tape is much more like Freud’s Wunderblock, susceptible at any point to modification and erasure. The disk lays sound out for manipulation and modification. Tape allows sound to turn back on, and in on itself. This could sometimes happen without human intervention. One of the most mysterious effects of old tapes was the phenomenon of ‘print-though’, caused by the fact that, when wound on top of one another, the magnetic patterns imprinted in one part of the tape could print themselves by induction on a neighbouring part of the tape. Normally this faint ghosting of the sound is buried by the principal signal, but it can become audible in blank passages of tape, causing a curious anticipation of the first second or so of a track before it actually begins. Tape embodies not just the stopping of time, but the spreading and thickening of the present moment.
This concept laid out here that tape embodies not just the stopping of time but the spreading and thickening is an interesting quality to give to an object such as tape. Tape being seen as possessing the qualities to control time isn’t wrong, The dynamic difference between vinyl and tape separates from the fact that vinyl is waiting to be played and manipulated. The tape wanted to be erased and re-recorded. When erased it still holds fragments of the past and ghosts within it. The thickening of the present moment is real.
In the early 1950s, Francois Poullin invented a device known as a ‘morphophone’. The morphophone played a loop of tape in a circle, in which were set an erasing head, a recording tape and ten playback heads, the positions of which could be adjusted, to allow different kinds of delays. Another technique devised by Brian Eno and Robert Fripp was called Frippertronics. This involves hooking up two tape recorders alongside each other; an input is recorded on the left hand machine, and the tape is fed to the right hand machine, which plays back the sound that has just been recorded, though with a few seconds’ delay. This signal can then be fed back to the first tape-recorder, and replaced by or mixed with whatever new sound may be being played.
These early ideas with tape and techniques have fabricated a current future we exist in, and at the time were very revolutionary. I searched for a morphophone and decided to see what it looked like. Really interesting, and the concept in itself is hilarious but also gives a sense of the technological advancement that was available at the time. The other technique of Frippertronics is also something similar I did with tape loops within my machine and within my final prototype hand-in.
Burroughs sees language itself as a kind of tape system, meaning that thinking itself is a kind of playback, or perhaps even a simultaneous recording and playback. Burroughs is not the only person to have borrowed from the tape-recorder to understand mental functioning. Recent work suggests that these kind of hallucinations may have their origin in some kind of distortion in the perception of time, for which the tape recorder has sometimes provided an apt analogy.
I think once again this idea that tape and human characteristics have similar qualities is true, and also can give us an understanding of tape as a medium and what it can offer that digital doesn’t. Being aware of similarities can help us draw conclusions and link ideas and thoughts together.
In fact, the relation between the right and left brains has often been understood in terms, not only of the circulation of recording and playback functions, but also of the difference between two different kinds of recording, namely the analogue and the digital
Again, the left and right brain relating to digital and analogue, playback and recording. The same way our brain works with retaining information. There are numerous connections within this.
I think this has been a great essay explaining some ideas about the temporality and corporeal abilities of tape, the connection with human-like qualities and the differences between vinyl and what tape offers the creator, as well as what tape did at its time.