A Stitch in Time: Sounding Magnetic Tape
Andrea Bohlman
Associate Professor of Music at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
This presentation emerges from a larger project on the history of magnetic tape that is concerned with tangling the competing narratives of sound recording history, so often formulated as critiques of technologies as instruments of colonial might or celebrations of sound recording as a means toward decentralized music industries and subversive political work. In this talk, I thread together a range of examples from across tape history, developing the idea of the seam as a theoretical framework with which to think. I build from a question: what do we hear when we listen to tape? I respond first with a historical introduction that emphasizes paradoxical invisibility and omnipresence of tape in the twentieth century to frame its cultural imaginaries, positioning audio tape as a site where systems, formats, and people meet. The core of my answer carefully listens for three sounds shaped by the materiality of tape and tape recording: the sound of compressed time (like rewind), the sound of stored and layered time (like overdubbing), and the surface sound of tape (hiss).
About Shana Redmond
Andrea F. Bohlman studies the political stakes of music making and sound in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, weaving together archival and ethnographic methodologies. She is associate professor of Music at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA. Much of her writing thinks through questions of political agency and strategies of shaping social movements through sound and music in Central and Eastern Europe, as in her 2020 book Musical Solidarities: Political Action and Music in Late Twentieth-Century Poland. Her articles and presentations on the history of sound recording—on mixtapes, soundwalks, and flash mobs—focus on the everyday, with particular enthusiasm for creative work with tape and tape recording. She is also the executive editor of the online publication of the American Musicological Society, Musicology Now.