“Whatever weird instrument your great-grandson will be playing, the Sony TC-377 will capture it.” From National Geographic, April 1973.

(via Boing Boing)

Sonic Fabric is a fabric woven with cassette tape. According to the artist,

Sonic fabric emits sound when you run a tape head (the little thingy inside the tape deck that touches the tape) over it. Because the tape retains its magnetic quality through the weaving process, it acts as a big wide band of tape.

I had no idea when I first conceived of this project that the fabric would be “listenable”… the point for me was just to get as many of my all-time favorite sounds onto the recording. So I made a collage of layered samples from my collection using an analog 4-track recorder. When you run the tape head over the fabric you are reading 4 or 5 strands of tape at once … in other words, 16 or 20 tracks all mixed together. It sounds kind of like scratching a record backwards or radio static.

Sounds like a cool idea! She says she’s even made custom gloves with tape heads on the fingers for playback.

update (via everyday listening): You can see a video of the fabric being made on a loom here.

“The Alchemists of Sound” is a BBC documentary about the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.

The Radiophonic Workshop was responsible for trippy sound effects for BBC shows starting in 1958, and among their most well-known achievements are the theme and basically all the sound effects from the original Dr. Who.

The hour-long special is up on YouTube in six parts. I’ve embedded part two above, because it was my favorite, but you can see the other parts, if you have an hour to kill, at the via link below.

(via Synthtopia)