Interactive Sound With Glove And Tape

November 9, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 14 Comments

Here’s a way to explore new spaces in untraditional manners: a sonophore, or a glove equipped with a tape heads meant to explore spaces with magnetic tape tracing the walls.

This project is a followup to the analogue tape glove from a few years ago. In that project, aligned strips of magnetic tape cover a canvas, leaving anyone wearing the glove to track their hand horizontally swiping across different tracts, or vertically listening to each track.

This project takes a glove similar to the analogue tape glove, but the tape is spread out along the walls of the installation. There’s no way of knowing what strange voices are contained on the tapes; the only way to know is to explore the space.

Video of the project below. It’s a Vimeo, so you know it’s artistic.

Continue reading “Interactive Sound With Glove And Tape” →

Building A Tape Recorder In 1949

February 8, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 19 Comments

tape

After telling a few stories about how he built a tape recorder as a 16-year-old boy in post-war Germany, [Hans] was finally cajoled into retelling this story in a proper form, giving the Internet one more example of how clever old-school tinkerers could be.

In 1949, [Hans] was but a wee lad of 16 and having built a crystal and tube radio set at 13 and 14 respectively desperately wanted a tour of the local radio station in Hamburg. A kind engineer responded to a letter and a month after requesting a tour [Hans] and his friend found themselves being guided around a proper radio station. One of the most impressive pieces of technology at the time was a tape recorder, which the engineer demonstrated by recording and playing back the voices of [Hans] and his friend. This was the first time [Hans] had ever heard his voice played back and instantly knew he needed to build one of these for himself.

Technical details on the theory and operation of a tape recorder were sparse, but [Hans] managed to come up with an amplifier, tape transport mechanism, a recording and playback head, and homemade magnetic tape made from a reel of iron filings glued to a reel of 8mm film stock.

Testing the equipment, [Hans] and his friend found the device simply wouldn’t work; the homemade magnetic tape was simply too thick, and you couldn’t just go out and buy a reel of magnetic tape. Undeterred, they mailed BASF, the only manufacturer of magnetic tape, and after a month received a 1000m reel of tape.

With tape that worked, [Hans] set about improving his recorder with a tape transport mechanism built from a turntable and a new recording head. This time, his tape recorder worked. When word got around of this amazing machine that could record music, [Hans] was invited to record the local symphony and the speeches for a senior group.

The first commercial reel to reel recorders were released in Germany a little more than a year after [Hans] completed his project, making this one of the more impressive DIY projects we’ve seen.

Recording Off A Reel-to-reel With A Credit Card Reader

June 16, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 22 Comments

If you’ve got a few reel-to-reel recordings of 1940s radio, how do you transfer those to a digital medium? [Evan Long] and his dad used a credit card reader built for the iPhone to transfer a vintage [Art Kassel] recording from magnetic tape to the digital domain of .MP3s.

A few months ago, we saw what goes into these Square credit card readers. They’re just a magnetic tape head with a resistor an 1/8″ jack that plugs directly into the headphone jack of any iDevice. Because there’s no hardware limitation of what the Square credit card reader can do, [The Long boys] decided to back up some old reel-to-reel tapes with an iPod Touch.

[Evan] and his father needed to perform a few modifications to the credit card reader; the tape head pressed against the plastic case too tightly to allow feeding 70-year-old tape through the device. After bending a bit of metal the credit card reader was ready to record the dulcet tones of the Big Band era.

It’s a neat build, and anything that reuses proprietary hardware (however limited) is alright in our book. Nice job, guys.