Lab 1 [Magnetic Noise]

Magnetic Noise

Our experience of sound is primarily a physical perception which is able to determine the quality of the personal and emotive dimension of our listening activity. For this reason, the format through which we listen music is able to shape our experience and then to change our relationship with what we are listening.

In the field of digital formats the quality of a technology is evaluated in terms of neutrality and high fidelity regarding the auditory content. A good format is the one that disappears during the reproduction and that does not affect the purity of our song. In the past, because of technological limitations it was impossible to obtain this result. The audio formats were recognisable through the listening of the audio content, their flaws or simply characteristics were not discernible from the music it self.

Between the solemnity of the vinyl records and the cold neutrality of CD’s, a recording and reproduction format changed our relationship with sound and with music, Compact Cassette.

The Cassette conserves your music in its thin tape and it protects it with a plastic case from our mistreatments. It shows the apparent vulnerability of the tape only for few millimetres in order to deliver its interpretation of our music. It carefully collects all the sounds, it smooths them reducing the excesses and it gives them back a warm, rounded but rich sound. The Cassette doesn’t disappear during the reproduction, it stays there. We can hear its swish during the formal silence while waiting the start of the first song with which immediately mix up. The delicate presence of the cassette is soon forgotten and we have the impression that the music is physically there. The Tom Waits’ voice sounds so concrete, the Kraftwerk’s synth is so soft and the Ramones are in my room!

Magnetic Noise is a gesture of affection to the Compact Cassette. With this work I tried to disclose the fascinating technology of magnetic tape. I wanted to isolate the characteristics of this format, usually considered flaws, in order to give them a central value. The glitches and undesired sounds of the cassette become the characteristic sounds of an instrument.

The design of the instrument is inspired by a practice that in the second part of the XX century radically transformed the approach of making music in different genres, the tape loop. The work consists of a ca. 40 cm of magnetic tape fixed to the plastic structures of two cassettes. The tape shared by the two cassettes stays uncover over most of its length. In the space between the two cassettes three magnetic heads extracted by old tape recorders are fixed on the wooden structure and soldered to three jack cables. One head (not in the presented version) works as recorder and its function is to “write“  the sound coming from a microphone in real time. The other two heads reproduce the recorded sound in two different moments depending to the speed of the tape, producing a rudimental delay effect. The player, rotating a little crank fixed on one of the cassettes wheel, controls the tape rotation and the speed. Moreover, thanks to the sensitivity of the magnetic heads it is possible to produce sounds and effect touching or hitting them. Depending on the speed of the tape rotation it is possible to hear traces of the original content of the tape, blended with the new recordings.