Tape Ensemble

[Ingo Lee]

Showed up on my YT feed. Don't ask me how it works. Or who dreamed this up.

[DawgBone]

I saw that on another site. Some people have way too much time on their hands.

[jazzloverfat]

I'll take this any day:

[JazzPadd]

Showed up on my YT feed. Don't ask me how it works. Or who dreamed this up.

This brings back some memories! Tape manipulation is fascinating. Before digital and analog effects, studio wizards in the old days discovered flanging by thumbing a reel.

I became so fascinated with that stuff in my youth that I learned some of how they do it, tape loops and such. I even got a job in a high school that wanted to revive its electronic music lab. Students developed some of their own tape loops, as short as 10" and others encircling the classroom, all gloriously out of sync and yet creating hypnotic ambiences.

That was pre-internet and pre-digital media. Students loved it, and even though a budget cut shut down the program, spending time at that job was enough to get me accepted to a university program to study with the composer Lejaren Hiller, the granddaddy of computer generated music who worked in the ILLIAC computer lab in the 1950s. Prof Hiller regaled students with stories of pre-tape data storage during the 1950s, loading thousands of punch cards into drawers to feed data into room-sized computers. In the 1960s, Hiller collaborated with John Cage on HPSCHD, a piece for harpsichord and computer-generated sounds.




It's wonderful to see new generations today exploring and expanding those sonic worlds!

[garybaldy]

Like a Mellotron but fewer tapes and not as melodic.