TONES FOR THE HEAD

AgentA - The Bird Says Hello
1983 - tape manipulation

During her summer travels, Jacqueline visited a friend who was caretaker at a bird sanctuary in Florida. She brought along a cassette tape recorder and documented her visit. She lent me the tape to use as a source for my experimental tape manipulation process.

The process involves using a number of portable cassette player recorders, a foot pedal effects processor called the Memory Man and a a couple of microphones.

Lacking a mixer, I would create "multitrack" mixes or "bounce" tracks by playing a couple of decks at once while using another to record the output through the speakers of each.

One deck had buttons for rewinding and forwarding while in play mode so you could hear the cueing. I used these buttons to create a rhythmic effect during one segment of this piece. A sort of dj "scratching" effect but with cassettes.

With this process, I would also make a copy of the source tape and play back both the source and copy tape at once. Since the decks speed varied to a small a degree, a phase shifting effect would result.

Sometimes I would send the signal from the headphone jack through the Memory Man plugged into my home stereo system and record that.

This piece was originally aired on the University of Pennsylvania's WXPN back in 1983 during Thom Dura's "Experimental Radio Project" show.

Equipped with a pc, a decent sound card and Sonic Foundry applications, I fed the tape signal into the pc for further manipulation during August of 2004. This entailed ridding most of the tape hiss noise and editing the original 15 minutes or more down to 6 minutes.

Note that Jacqueline's source tape document was a spontaneous field recording aiming to record her friend's attempt to make one of the birds say, "Hello". During this time, a Robert Fripp and Brian Eno album was playing in the background and is quite audible in this piece.