Tape Traverse

Tape Traverse is a musical instrument built using cassette tape players and analog circuits. It can be shown both as a performance of me playing it in a composition, and as an exhibition table project for participants to interact with it. The instrument is made by two hacked cassette tape players, a soft potentiometer that controls their speed, two tape loops, and an optical tremolo module. It is portable and designed to hold and play as a guitar. Through hardware and the physical movements it creates, this instrument explores the interplay between sound and rotation. The inspiration of Tape Traverse stems from two concepts: rotation and travel. Rotating along a circle gives us a sine wave, looping various audio clips creates dynamic compositions, and repeating a kick drum sound at a high frequency yield a synth-like tone. While rotation is inherently cyclic, I believe travel is the process that bridges this rotational property with the linear structure of music we listen to everyday. Imagine a point travelling along a circle cyclically, and at the mean time generating a tone that we perceive in a time-based manner. Tape Traverse explores using hardware and the physical movements they enable to embody the concepts of rotation and travel in sound. Performers see the tape traveling of the cassette tape moving from one side to the other when making sound. They will also see the spinning of the disk when turning on tremolo using knobs. The instruments’ sound qualities, pitch and amplitude modulations, are all embodied by the qualities of the hardware enabled physical movements. I built this project by learning open-source hardware resources and tutorials, including the MAKE magazines and open-source schematics. The schematics of this instrument will also be released before the summit, allowing people to modify and customize it by changing the timber, creating new modulation patterns, or just simply create upon this. I think there is a lot of variations can be made and I aspire people’s participation in this project. This project is a result of the New Interfaces of Musical Expression class, from New York University Tisch School of the Art, Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), instructed by Professor David Rios. I appreciate the help from Octavio Figueroa Moya, Andre Lira, and Vivian Jia. This project is impossible without their help.