Tape: Or, Rewinding the Phonographic Regime

Abstract

Magnetic tape follows the contours of the twentieth century in striking ways, from the overtly sonic and musical to less obvious political and social transformations. This introductory article sets the tone for this special issue, an effort to connect discrete histories of tape through a focus on its materialities. We posit the existence of a phonographic regime that coheres around a loose set of assumptions that often appear in tandem with broad claims about what ‘sound recording’ or even ‘analogue media’ are. This regime dates back to the invention of phonography but persists through many contemporary histories of sound recording. We challenge the regime by thinking with and through tape recording. One of tape's critical media operations, ‘rewind’, serves as a central focus for our push-back against the regime. As a button-interface, it highlights the physical engagement of humans with materialities, including the corporal labours of using technology, with iconography that digital technologies still employ. As a mechanism of respooling, it points to the industrial histories of various spooling forerunners from textiles to film reels. As we explore its cultural techniques in musical practices, we consider rewind, above all, as a temporal gesture that offers new paths backward into history.

The Recording Cure: A Media Genealogy of Recorded Voice in Psychotherapy

“…Yet it seems that the built-in recordability and erasability of the magnetic tape carried further meaning. Technologically speaking, recording and erasing are synonymous operations, erasability being an integral feature of the technology itself (Bohlman and McMurray, 2017). Albeit resonating with Freud’s ‘mystic writing-pad’ analogy for the psychic apparatus, the tape’s erasability is far more radical with no wax slab equivalent to retain past impressions.…”

Cybernetics, Listening, and Sound-Studio Phenomenotechnique in Abraham Moles’s Théorie de l’information et perception esthétique (1958)

“…120 Though neither player supported normal-speed reverse playback using their push-button interfaces, it was trivial to reverse the tape's playback direction: the open-reel layout afforded the switching of left and right tape reels, so that the tape would unspool in the opposite direction. 121 Such "tricks" with recording equipment were long familiar to audio professionals; indeed, a patent was sought in 1943 for reverse "re-recording" as technique for improving the quality of phonographic recordings dubbed from a telephoneline source. 122 On Moles's two-level information-theoretic account, reverse playback stripped music of its semantic information precisely because it liquidated those components of the original signal that represent music's progression in time: its moment-to-moment syntax, which afforded listeners' expectations and predictions.…”

Editorial: New Wor(l)ds for Old Sounds

“…Studies exemplifying a historicist turn to the sonic draw attention to the acoustic properties of ancient and early modern spaces, and those of more recent built environments (Atkinson 2016; Blesser and Salter 2007; Fisher 2014); they search archival documents for the sounds of colonial encounter (Rath 2005) and the hubbub of England in the Victorian period and earlier (Picker 2003; Cockayne 2007); they find traces of the noisy mediaeval city in manuscript illuminations (Dillon 2012); they document sound and its silencing to trace shifting urban identities and values (Bjisterveld 2008; Thompson 2002); they investigate the properties of instruments and technologies, from monochords to metronomes, developed to chart interval space and measure musical time (Grant 2014), to cassette tapes (Bohlman and McMurray 2017); they consider the collision of early recording technology with contemporary Western musical aesthetics (Rehding 2005).…”