Case studies, between materiality and practice

While the materiality of tape is fascinating – and crucial for understanding the practices of those professionals and amateurs who worked with audiotape – materialism on its own cannot provide an adequate account of the ‘meaning of audiotape’ (as I intend the term) since such meaning, or range of meanings, is inseparable from the way that prior (and newly generated) cultural practices are related to audiotape's medium-specific properties. Cultural practices involving audiotape – like those involved in listening, composing, recording, splicing, pirating, trading, decorating, labelling, and the like – exhibit a broad range of continuities and discontinuities with cultural practices of sound, as well as connections and disconnections with sonic media. They exhibit every degree of relation, from the sheer indifference (and resilience) to different media, to inflections and deflections of practices in the encounter and transfer from one media to another, to extinction or obsolescence or discontinuation of practices altogether.

Thus I will focus neither on cultural practices alone, nor on the materiality and specificity of tape alone, but on the place where they intersect – in the relay and transformation of a practice as it encounters a shift in media. In other words, I want to consider media's affordances, in particular, the affordances of audiotape. That is, I want to consider the relation between actors and the materiality of tape where the potentialities of use are canalized, delimited, or inflected in relation to previous cultural practices.

To that end, I will sketch a few ‘case studies’, sites where a cultural practice encounters a change in media. In these encounters a change in media does not necessarily produce a correlative change in practice, but may well spark an unexpected or unforeseen change, or even no change at all. In each case study, the shift in media will involve the transition from phonograph disk to audiotape – which puts us squarely in the historical period spanning the late 1940s through the 1950s.

Case 1: the tape loop

The tape loop must be considered under two distinct attributes: material and perceptual. In terms of its material, the tape loop is formed from a simple and economical operation. A piece of magnetic tape is cut from a longer strip with two careful strokes of a razor blade. The two ends are brought together and fastened with a piece of adhesive, producing a loop that can be continuously dragged across the head of a tape machine. When played back in this raw form, the material and perceptual attributes of the loop are closely related. The sound seems to ‘loop’ just like the piece of tape – making material form perceptible at the level of content. The loops of speech used by Steve Reich in his famous mid-1960s tape pieces, It's Gonna Rain and Come Out, are good examples. Here, one hears the short duration of a sound repeating over and over (‘come out and show them, come out and show them, come out and show them’) where the beginning and end of the utterance corresponds with the cut and re-attachment of the tape's ends. Yet such mirroring of material form and perceptual content is actually quite rare when it comes to using tape loops. Rather, the divergence of these two attributes is more common.

On the one hand, this perceptual attribute – that is, hearing a sample repeating or ‘looping’ numerous times – was exploited in the very earliest compositions of musique concrète. If one listens to Pierre Schaeffer's Étude aux chemins de fer, with its samples of trains transformed into repetitive rhythmic cells, or to the opening of the Étude violette, with its repetitive clicking, clacking, and banging of the piano's mechanism, a contemporary listener might think that these compositions were made from tape loops.Footnote ⁴ In reality, these recordings were made using locked-groove phonograph recordings, sillons fermés, discs specially produced to isolate and repeat a small fragment of sound. The sound of the sillon fermé – with its ever-present loop of about one second in duration – is present across the entire early output of Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry. Here the perceptual loop is not bound to the material loop of tape, since no tape whatsoever is involved.

On the other hand, when tape (and the tape loop) was introduced to Schaeffer's studio, beginning in October 1950, the sound of musique concrète dramatically changed: it became less ‘loopy’.Footnote ⁵ One does not find the mirroring of material form and perceptual content that is so distinctive of Reich's minimalism. Instead, the tape loop afforded new possibilities for the transformation of sound far in excess of simple looping repetition. Loops containing discrete sounds were used as source material and fed into machines designed to transform and alter their sonic characteristics. Vladimir Ussachevsky, in an article introducing the basic ideas of ‘tape music’ to American audiences, described the situation at Schaeffer's studio this way:

The morphophone was a machine designed to transform tape loops by including ten, independently movable playback heads (plus a recording and erasing head) instead of the usual, fixed single-head arrangement.Footnote ⁷ The playback heads were attached to amplifiers and filters, and could be fed back to the recording head. This allowed for the transformation of a sound by producing chorus-like effects, spectral transformations, delays, echos, and the like. The phonogène could transpose a sample of sound. It came in two forms: continuous, where tape speed was operated by a lever, and discrete, where speed was controlled by a small piano keyboard.Footnote ⁸ (The latter was a precursor of commercial samplers.) The phonogène is the machine behind the jagged serial melody, assembled from vocal sounds, heard in Pierre Henry's Vocalises, from 1952. Again, these sounds do not announce or make directly audible the fact that their material support is spooled up with tape loops.

Each machine exploits the affordances of magnetic tape in different ways. The morphophone, which can read sounds from one part of the tape loop and record them onto another, can produce continuous mutations of sound. Such mutations were unavailable using the old method with sillons fermés. The phonogène, in contrast, designed on the principle that a change in tape speed corresponds to a perceptual change in pitch, follows in the wake of the phonograph. One could have theoretically built a phonogène with phonographs, cumbersome as it may have been to engineer. Its originality lies in the compactness and simplicity that tape loops afford; but it does not exploit the affordance of erasure and re-recording found in the morphophone.

Case 2: serialism and audiotape

Unlike the morphophone and the phonogène, the machine à trois pistes was not designed for the mutation of sound. Rather, it allowed for the layering and spatialization of three independent tapes by synching them to a common motor. It aided in the composition of polyphonic works. One of the first pieces to explore the affordances of this machine was Olivier Messiaen's now-forgotten Timbres-durées. In 1952, Pierre Henry assisted Messiaen in constructing a piece of musique concrète designed to explore ideas about serialized rhythm. By using concrete sounds instead of instruments, Messiaen hoped to draw attention to the ‘timbre of durations’, to make perceptible the evolving combinations and permutations of note lengths that he had previously explored in his Livre d'orgue and Quatre études de rythme.

Tape also brought an additional affordance, a rhythmic precision that was not attainable using traditional instruments and trained performers. Working from Messiaen's traditionally notated sketches, Henry generated a manuscript that translated durations into precise tape lengths. Similar ideas concerning the translation of duration into tape length were explored in a variety of concrète works from the years 1951 and 1952, a list that would have to include: Henry's Vocalises, the first piece in his catalogue to experiment with precise, serialized rhythm and duration, Boulez's Études I and II, and Stockhausen's Konkrete Etüde, among others. The ability to measure duration in centimetres and, thus, produce complex serial operations on time is a unique affordance of tape.

On the one hand, this might encourage an account of high serialism grounded in the materiality of tape and its conversion of temporal duration into spatial length. In 1961, the music critic and composer André Hodeir made just such an argument. In his affirmative assessment of Pierre Boulez, Hodeir describes the Études as ‘bringing an attitude of implacable discipline to musique concrète, subject until then to the whims of amateurs’, and contributing a ‘real meaning to the notion of “music for tape”’ by providing ‘dignified proof that musical materials of a non-dodecaphonic nature [i.e., sound objects] are capable of being organized along serial lines’. One significant aspect of this proof, in Hodeir's estimation, concerned tape's ability to ‘afford the composer an unprecedented freedom in the handling of rhythm’. In Boulez's use of tape, ‘Many irrational rhythmic structures which simply cannot be played by any orchestra and still others, even more complex, which are beyond the grasp of the most accomplished soloist, can be easily elaborated and heard in all their perfection thanks to precise editing.’Footnote ⁹ Hodeir illustrates this point with a small transcription (ostensibly from the Études), where two irrational rhythms in counterpoint are translated into tape lengths measured in centimetres.

On the other hand, the ‘language’ of integral serialism was already established before tape arrived at the studio. Serialized organization of pitch and rhythm, first devised with scores and traditional instruments, was imported into work with magnetic audiotape. Here I see a relay of cultural practice from one medium to another, deflected or inflected in relation to the medium. From this perspective, these pieces may say more about the affordances of tape than about its materiality. We miss the point if we focus primarily on the link between duration and tape length at the expense of the other musical aspects of such work.

From this perspective Messiaen's Timbre-durées is illuminating. As musicologist Christopher Murray has noted, Messiaen was not only ‘specifically interested by the rhythmic accuracy afforded by the tape technology introduced to the studio in the spring of 1951’, but also ‘hoped the recorded sounds of musique concrète would be more self-effacing than the timbres of traditional instruments and would bring his rhythmic experiments to the foreground of the listening experience’.Footnote ¹⁰ Messiaen was primarily interested in the way that non-instrumental sounds – sounds only available for compositional use by means of audio recording – could draw attention to aspects of rhythm that went beyond precision alone. Concrete sounds could colour time without having to worry about the additional dimension of harmony. At least this was Messiaen's intention, as Stockhausen reported to Karel Goeyvaerts in a letter concerning Timbres-durées, dated 18 April 1952:

If we shift our listening toward timbre, we might locate another set of cultural practices inflected or deflected by its encounter with a new medium. In this case, we locate the relay from the orchestrator's attentiveness to Klang or Klangfarbe to the electronic musician's attentiveness to the strange variety of sounds captured and arranged on the tape. In fact, as Murray notes, Messiaen suggested that Henry be declared the arranger of Timbre-durées when it came time to register the work with SACEM in the summer of 1952.Footnote ¹²

Many composers before the era of audiotape fantasized about media or machines that could realize complicated rhythms and durations with a precision that went beyond the capacities of performers. If tape afforded the possibility for composers to realize this fantasy, it also helped bring about its collapse. Even Hodeir acknowledges that the Études are ‘undeniable failures as works of art’, choosing instead to cast their significance in terms of the scientific or mathematical language of ‘proofs’.Footnote ¹³ The lack of artistic success is recuperated by positioning the piece within the long, slow march of musico-scientific progress. While such a view was common to the rhetoric of mid-century music criticism, such an admission can also be read in terms of the relay of previous musical practices to new media. Perhaps the ‘proof’ of Boulez's Études is not that of scientific progress, but a different kind altogether. Once the technical limitation to realizing serialized rhythm had been lifted, it became clear that the absolutely precise realization of serialized rhythms on audiotape did not make serialized rhythm more perceptible or comprehensible. The fantasy was exposed for what it was – a void to be filled, a lure triggered by a lack of technical means. Ironically the materiality of tape did not support a practice that seemed to be its correlate, but rather undermined the practice by turning fantasy, its mainspring and motivation, into reality. Certain practices of serialism, the desire to precisely realize serialized rhythm, were not prolonged in the encounter with audiotape; rather, the encounter helped to end them altogether.

Case 3: overdubbing

As audiotape was introduced in the electronic music studio, it also made its way into the studios of popular music. Here we might consider the work of guitarist Les Paul. Paul often plays a supporting role in the story of magnetic tape's American dissemination through his association with Bing Crosby, his use of Ampex tape recorders to create pre-recorded radio transcriptions in the early 1950s, and through his hit, overdubbed recordings with Mary Ford produced in his home studio.Footnote ¹⁴

By autumn 1947, Paul had perfected his techniques for creating overdubbed recordings using a special phonograph disk lathe cutter. These ‘sound on sound’ disk recordings can be heard on his first 78s released on Capitol records, tracks such as Lover, Brazil, and What is this Thing Called Love. A year later, Crosby gave Paul an Ampex 200A machine as a gift, but the transition to audiotape would take some time. The original 200A machine had no capacity to produce overdubs, which was crucial for the production of Paul's ‘New Sound’. In 1949, after a series of experiments and in consultation with Jack Mullin – a famous figure in the history of the tape recorder – Paul devised a method for overdubbing audiotape that involved mounting additional tape heads on the machine. Paul's modified Ampex machine configured the heads as follows: playback, erase, record, and playback.Footnote ¹⁵ This configuration let Paul play along with a previously recorded track (auditioned on headphones), mix the two signals together, and record them on the same piece of audiotape as the original. The process had its drawbacks, however: in making a new recording, the old recording was erased. In this ‘destructive’ process, Paul would have to go back to the beginning and start over again if he made a mistake in assembling his recordings. This was unlike Paul's phonographic ‘disk-to-disk’ method, where mistakes could be corrected by simply returning to the last good recording and recording the new part again. Paul eventually split the difference, settling on a method that involved two unmodified Ampex machines, where tracks could be bounced from machine to machine, thus allowing for bad takes to be redone without destroying the previous iteration.Footnote ¹⁶ Throughout most of the 1950s, Paul worked this way.

In some accounts Paul's shift from disk cutter to modified tape recorders is motivated by a hunt for superior sound quality, and here the material differences between phonography discs and audiotape seem to motivate a shift in practices.Footnote ¹⁷ And yet, I find it very hard to detect the moment where Paul shifted from working with phonographic overdubbing to audiotape from the sound of the recordings alone.Footnote ¹⁸ Both techniques produce audible degradation, often in proportion to the number of tracks superimposed. Simple arrangements recorded on disc often sound less degraded than complex arrangements made with tape. Since Paul and Ford were constantly on the road, working under intense pressure to produce a weekly radio programme, perform live shows, and make new recordings for Capitol, factors other than fidelity should be considered. The Ampex machines, unlike the lathe disk cutter, could be transported in the back of a car. This allowed Paul to produce his radio show and recordings with less equipment, an affordance just as important as any supposed improvements in fidelity.

Moreover, the fact that Paul used phonographs to make his earliest solo recordings reminds us that phonography has a long history of use for home recording, going back to Edison's earliest applications. Some phonographs came with two tone arms – one for recording, one for playback – or one could purchase kits to modify standard phonographs into recording machines.Footnote ¹⁹ Practices of home recording again precede tape; they are relayed, inflected, and deflected in the encounter with the new medium.

The matter of audibility

In all of these encounters, I have placed an emphasis on audibility, on whether the materiality of magnetic tape can be heard, and when it is heard, how it relates to previous cultural practices. Audibility is itself a complex issue – one that runs into serious ethnographic concerns about the difference between contemporary and historical listeners, not to mention differences from culture to culture and within cultures. I have no desire to diminish that complex issue. I simply note that from the perspective of a media archaeologist such as Wolfgang Ernst, any approach that ties audibility to cultural practice and not to technological media as such will likely be seen as a retrenchment in outmoded ‘cultural history’. According to Ernst, the ‘perspective of cultural history . . . tends to privilege evolutionary continuities and soft transformations’ rather than address the hard discontinuities introduced with the arrival of new media.Footnote ²⁰ My emphasis on the continuities and transformations of cultural practices of listening, and their audibility in relation to changes in media, would not adequately address the historical discontinuities or ‘events’ caused by the arrival of new media, which ‘cannot be reduced to discursive effects’.Footnote ²¹ To hear such events Ernst promotes a ‘media-archaeological ear’ that listens ‘to the sound of material tradition’, to ‘the technically mediated sonic processuality of what is otherwise called history’. This ear is ‘an alternative to the cultural emphasis on listening to musical semantics’ or other kinds of messages.Footnote ²² Readers of Kittlerian-inspired media theory know where Ernst's argument is heading. Cultural ears, too wrapped up in the Symbolic and Imaginary registers, cannot hear how audio technologies expose the Real – all that which (supposedly) evades and (supposedly) conditions cultural practices. In such a view, the medium is always the real message, while the signal or mediated ‘content’ becomes so much stuffing with which to fill some medium's noisy channel.Footnote ²³

From this perspective, my case studies would be one more instance of soft, continuous, or evolutionary cultural practices, and thus they would be oblivious to the ‘event’ of audiotape. By listening to audiotape's event with the wrong set of ears, my argument cannot properly distinguish cultural practices of listening from the real driver of historical change, that is, media and its ‘material tradition’. But to hierarchize technological media over cultural practices, when taken as axiomatic, ultimately assumes that the materiality of media provides the transcendental condition of the phenomenal without further justification. I find that view too narrow and too partial; like most philosophies that conclude with the shocking exposure of the Real, it is too satisfied with its provocative anti-humanism. As many media and cultural theorists have argued, new media are not separate from cultural practice, but are rather both its root and its fruit.Footnote ²⁴ The legibility and efficacy of new media to their users depend on relationships with prior practices, even as those practices are being transformed.

Moreover, I am often uncertain where to draw the line between a material property of some medium and the cultural practices that engage it. To illustrate, consider spooled media. The linearity of audiotape – a material property – means that it is most efficiently stored on spools that can be unravelled. The same could be said of celluloid film. But attention to materiality alone is too blunt to effectively distinguish between practices of using spooled media. For instance, film remains an important archival medium – preferred by archivists due to its resolution, longevity, and accessibility. A present-day researcher can see what is on the film by simply unspooling it and holding it up to a light source. Yet magnetic tape is an infuriating archival medium.Footnote ²⁵ One is always searching for things when working with tape – fast-forwarding, rewinding, trying to get to the right spot. This situation is supplemented by making transcripts, by keeping logs, by neatly writing tracks and timings on the paper inserts included in blank cassettes or on the front of reel-to-reel boxes, or by constantly resetting tape counters (which never really seem to work very well). From where does this disjunction arise? Perhaps the media materialist might reply that spooling is a cultural practice – a way of storing media – that ultimately relies on the material difference between film's photographic capture of images and audiotape's inscription of magnetized signals. Yet this response, with its appeal to materiality, only becomes relevant as a way of trying to explain away the difference in cultural practices already noted. In reducing culture, appeal to materiality often begs the question of culture and its dynamics. The value of explanans is only as valuable as the explanandum. If we did not already have the practical disjunction between the archival use of film and audiotape, would consideration of these material differences ever have arisen? And what if the disjunction had not arisen? Would these specific material differences matter?

The infuriating nature of the tape archive sits at the centre of Samuel Beckett's meditation on the subject, Krapp's Last Tape.Footnote ²⁶ Consider Krapp's actions and how much time he spends dealing with the tape recorder and its paralipomena, rather than listening to the recording he seeks. Krapp consults his ledger (‘box three, spool five’); turns the tape machine on and off; loads and unloads spools; searches around for specific bits, cursing when he cannot find them; and records himself (or tries to, but realizes that the machine is not working, or the microphone is not on). In addition, one cannot underestimate the importance of the spool in Krapp's Last Tape. Aside from pulling out spools, threading them into the machine, pulling them off, and violently brushing them off his desk onto the floor, the word ‘spool’ – with its rounded, loopy, continuously smooth vowel ‘ooooooo’ – is enjoyed by Krapp again and again in a kind of obscene and regressive babble.

Further questions

If babble is where my meditation on audiotape began, it might as well be the place where it ends – severed like a piece of audiotape severed with a razor blade. In lieu of fixed conclusions, I unspool a series of questions for further consideration:

• • What are the advantages and disadvantages of focusing on the materiality of tape rather than its affordances? What is the best way to understand the relation between media affordances and materiality? How does attentiveness to tape's affordances facilitate new or alternative histories of tape's meaning and use?

• • How does the multistage development of tape (from magnetophone, to reel-to-reel, to multichannel tape, to the Nagra, to 8-tracks, to cassettes, to computer drives) intersect with cultural practices and audile techniques? How does this material history contribute to a history of listening?

• • What kind of archive is created by tape? Does it differ significantly from other kinds of archives? What forms of supplementation (or metadata, to speak anachronistically) accrue to tape's linear mode of access? What modes of listening are demanded for accessing that archive, and what traces of practices are indexed in the tape archive? What aspects must we attend to when listening to the artifacts (and artifactuality) of audiotape?