ON ZOOM
Meeting ID: 863 6130 1209
Passcode: 9Vnag9

“A Stitch In Time”: Thinking Magnetic Tape as Seam

Abstract:

This paper explores how the labors, sounds, and creative practices associated with magnetic tape recording resist a comprehensive, integrated theory for the recording format. Instead, I propose a poetic orientation toward tape as and at a seam, building on theoretical work by sociologists of science and technology who trouble the promises of seamless computing and philosophers of textile whose insights center the body. On these terms, tape offers the possibility to knit eclectic musical/sonic examples together. From the significantly mundane (answering machine micro-cassettes) to well-worn tales (the reel-to-reel tapes beneath the surface of Folkways LPs) and lasting contentious debates (about the relative annoyance of hiss), my examples show tape to rise and fade from material significance. Thinking about tape as seam thus ultimately orients me to think about tape’s materiality on a human, or local, scale to engage different cultural meanings the sounds of tape have come to hold.

Bio:

An associate professor of music at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Andrea Bohlman studies the political stakes of music making and sound in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Much of Bohlman’s work builds on her expertise on music in East Central Europe, cultures of protest, and everyday histories of sound recording. Her 2020 monograph, Musical Solidarities: Political Action and Music in Late Twentieth-Century Poland, grows out of a decade of research on work of sound and music for the opposition to state socialism in Poland. She is currently writing a book that engages the history of tape recording as a site of knowledge production to ask questions about sound, listening, and the idea—and practice—of consent.