User:Riviera/Mixing a tape

This wiki post was made through a combination of writing and voice recording techniques. What I am going to do is read what I have written and expand, where appropriate, upon what I have written before returning to the main flow of the text. The text itself is fairly short. However, I feel that by expanding on what I have written by speaking, it will become longer and more detailed. I intend to then transcribe what I have said and edit the material. Then post the edited transcription on the wiki. So, without further ado…

On the afternoon of October 26, and during most of Friday 27th I made tape recordings, I am not referring to cassette tapes, but long reels of tape. The tape I was recording on to was approximately 500 meters in length, I made a recording which was the complete length of the tape on the Friday. In what follows I discuss my experiences of recording onto tape

The most effective setup

I sent audio from my laptop to channels one and two on a 16 channel mixing desk. As we can see in the photo taken on the Thursday I had several machines connected to each another. For the purposes of recording audio, connecting my laptop to the mixing desk was one aspect of this setup. On the Friday, I also plugged a radio into channels three and four. Working with the 16 channel mixing desk was far more effective than working with the eight channel mixing desk. I did not take a photograph of my setup on a Friday. However, I will elaborate on two reasons as to why it was more effective to use the setup with the 16 channel mixing desk. Firstly, the effects panel is not working on the eight channel mixing desk, but it is working on the 16 channel mixing desk. Secondly, the eight channel mixing desk picks up a lot of noise and the 16 channel desk does not do this. I connected the 16 channel mixing desk to an Akai tape recording and playback machine. This machine belongs to one of Joseph's friends, and I made sure to be careful with it. It was According to Joseph the best tape machine out of the three which are available. Indeed, it was. I had difficulty getting the results I wanted on the pieces of hardware which I was using on the Thursday. In short, I was recording sounds from two devices on to tape and using the mixing desk as a way to get these machines to communicate.

Drawing on the prototyping classes, which we had on the Monday and the Tuesday was key to the activities I engaged in later in the week. In these prototyping clauses, we looked at how to record sounds in analog and digital ways. We also created HTML audio mixers with functions which enabled looping the audio file and adjusting the playback rate with greater granularity. I built upon this HTML soundboard by adding eight separate audio tracks and adding a volume level slider. Each audio recording was a file in a series of recordings in Worm's radio archive. There were many variables which allowed me to alter the sound. This came from all of the hardware that I was using. I had plugged the laptop with this setup into the mixing desk, so that was one set of variables I could control (the playback volume and the playback speed). As I could also choose particular files and the time at which to play them from it was possible to layer these audio recordings. However, all the tracks were one hour in length. It was simpler to simply reduce the playback rate, so that the tracks continued to play for a very long time. In part, I was inspired by my previous collaboration with Victor in which we made a tape recording and overlaid sounds onto the tape. I placed this idea in a digital context and played multiple tracks simultaneously for an overlaid sound effect. These signals went directly into the mixer, the analog mixer, the physical piece of hardware made by Behringer. Specifically, the signals went into channels one and two which were panned to left and right respectively. The signal was then sent to the first and second output bus channels. The hardware has four output bus channels which meant that I was able to set four output levels individually.

Recording session in the studio on Thursday October 26th

Moreover, there were two pieces of hardware that I connected to the mixer. one of the pieces of hardware was my laptop, the other piece of hardware was a radio. I added the latter into the mix on the Friday in order to get radio signals. Partly because it was mentioned that radio was effective back in week one. I wanted to retrieve similar sounds and combine with other sounds on the tape. And sometimes it works sometimes it didn't work. A time when it was effective was when I took out the connection between the radio and the mixing desk in order to tune it to a signal which I thought sounded right before reintroducing the sound. I was able to do this because of the four output bus channels. The radio was plugged into input channels three and four, which were panned also to left and right initially. As before, channels three and four were being sent to output bus channels three and four. I could set the levels of each of these output bus channels individually so what I could do was fade the radio all the way down, take out the connection, find a signal that I liked, remake the connection and then reintroduce the sound of the radio.

Likewise, there were physical buttons on the mixer, which controlled which output bus channel the input signal was to go to. It was possible to press eight of these buttons simultaneously with eight fingers and switch all the channels going to buses one and two to buses three and four and vice versa. This had a really pleasant effect. If the levels of output bus channels two, one, three and four were set to different levels, then it was possible to get a really nice effect by redirecting signals to the different levels of the master faders. It was also good that the effects panel was working, because I was able to apply effects such as reverb, flange and delay to the signal. For example, I applied a flange effect to voices speaking live on the radio. Because the effects panel was broken on the eight channel mixing desk, which I was using on a Thursday, it wasn't possible to apply these effects during that recording session.

The following table lists the variables which I was in charge of during the recording session.

Laptop	Radio	Mixing Desk	Tape Machine
Playback Rate	Volume	Pan	Line levels
Volume	(Fine) Tuning	Gain
Loop function	Tone	EQ
		Send buttons
		Effects
		Levels

Whilst experimenting with these machines it was important, above all, to monitor the levels of the lines into the tape machine. I wanted to be as careful as possible about ensuring that the sound was not clipping or peaking and putting too much pressure on the tape machine. Conveniently, the tape machine has physical, analog indicators which show the amount of volume which is going through the left and right channels at any given time. These indicators move independently of one another. There's a lot of manual engagement with the technology which lends itself to subtle differences in volume or subtle differences in pan and gain. This entails different experiences in the left and right channels. Furthermore the sounds I was recording were stereo signals. For these reasons it's very important to monitor the levels going into channels one and two because they can vary sometimes considerably.

Perhaps I will record more onto the tape which I was using to make it different. Currently, it's quite lengthy. It lasts for approximately an hour and a half I imagine. It would be very straightforward to plug more devices into this setup. I think there's an opportunity to add to the content of the tape, to change it up, to introduce other tapes halfway through at different times. This would add in more discontinuity. But returning to the table, which I was speaking about. On the mixing desk, there was as I mentioned, a pan as well as the equalizer. And the equalizer was nice. Sometimes if it got too bassy, you could turn the bass down. Or if I wanted to emphasise the treble, I could increase the treble level. In general, one could record a variety of sounds into the tape using the mixing desk as a intermediary.

The influence of live coding

I have titled this section 'The influence of live coding' because of the performative quality of the experience of experimenting as I did. In short, I regard performance as the connective tissue which binds live coding to recording onto tape. In my previous broadcast with Senka and Lorenzo I attempted to live code with sounds taken from Worm's radio archive. That was an exciting and yet challenging experience for several reasons. Firstly, it was quite audible when I was typing. That was disrupting the experience of listening to the algorithms because there was this thumping noise in the background. Secondly, live coding was tricky because the samples were of a very variable length. Normally I live code with percussive samples and semi-percussive tones. Working with samples of various lengths was challenging. However, I believe this was something which this experiment with the tape recorder could have benefited from. I selected audio recordings from Worm's archive using broadcasts which were from the same folder. Presumably they were all part of the same series of broadcasts. All were exactly an hour in length and I hoped their similarities would produce an effect that was aesthetically consistent.

However, the tracks were somewhat dissimilar in content. There were times when you heard people shouting. There were times when there was heavy club music. There were other times when there were bird noises, for example. So there was a lot of variety in these shows. But primarily, I used instrumental sounds. If I had used shorter sounds that might have been effective because of the loop functionality of the HTML mixer which I had made. The ability to loop could have been used to a rhythmic effect. But that's not something which I attempted. Nevertheless, I imagined using the browser-based mixer as a live interface with which to create sounds on the recording. it's not live coding, just mixing sounds in the browser. Nevertheless, I've been reflecting on my live coding practice having spent some time in a wood workshop and in a ceramics workshop. It was interesting to work with these materials. I had worked with them in a limited capacity when I was a pre-teenager but not since. And it's interesting to come back to these materials after so many years. They never really featured previously in my practice, in any way whatsoever. So, spending time in the Word workshop, one afternoon, turning wood, just to see what it was like. And to create various shapes with curves out of a square block of wood was extremely satisfying. And got me thinking about crafting materials. With the ceramics, the plasticity of the material, the ability to transform it into so many different shapes, made it difficult to work with. On the whole, cutting wood with machines is more mathematical than preparing and shaping clay.

I started to think about these experiences in terms of my own practice. For me it's about shaping something. I was thinking about the materiality of code and I was thinking about shaping code in the same way that one shapes a piece of wood, or a block of clay. With live coding, one can start with an algorithm which is so simple and expand it into a different shape. Or apply other variables and pass different keywords to the algorithm. Or construct it differently. It's possible to shape visual and sonic output in a way analogous to shaping wood and clay. I hadn't thought about live coding in that way before. I thought about it, in part, as a demonstration of how I was using a computer, because I felt like it was quite different to the way many other people use computers. Also, live coding is performative and I was trying to make performance art. So, live coding seemed like a practical solution. And I didn't think about it in relation to workshop practices involving materials such as clay and wood.

In a sense, the experiment required me to turn from software to hardware. I was using buttons and dials to shape the sound and experiment with different effects. What happens if I switch the button to a different position? How do I ensure that the signal coming through is loud and clear? What happens if the bass is too high and needs to be reduced? It was deliberate experimentation with particular constrictions except that the constrictions are there in front of you. They're not concealed within the source code, even open source code . Because there is a physical interface to work with.