The open reel tape recorder, originally designed to record and play audio, has been remodeled and transformed into a computerized composing machine. Sounds picked up through a microphone are recorded, reconfigured and played back, emerging new, yet familiar, with a distinctively analog flavor.
The open reel recorder is an analog recording device that captures audio and records it onto electromagnetic tape, a practice slowly dying amid the current shift to digital recording methods by hard disc storage devices. The tapes that are designed to sit on the reel are large and cumbersome and require additional skill to be set up, which is why the open reel has been replaced with more portable and simpler to operate cassette tapes. By taking original sound equipment and transforming it both in terms of how it works and how it is used, this artwork makes the most of the unique characteristics of the old technologies, while creating an interface for analog and digital technologies and the possibilities they present. Music is created from a combination of recorded voices and the “movements” of the recorders themselves, such as when the three recorders linked in a network synchronize, the tapes are vibrated directly by external computer-controlled equipment to produce a vibrato, or the reels are sped up or slowed down.