Tape Music

Tape music is the body of electronic composition that uses recorded sound on magnetic tape as its primary material, manipulated through cutting, splicing, reversing, varying playback speed, and looping. Sources include musical instruments, environmental sound, voice, and pure electronic tones. The edits are physical: scissors, splicing block, adhesive tape. The audible result is a music whose time relationships do not come from performance but from physical surgery on a medium.

The practice began in Paris in 1948 with Pierre Schaeffer's 'musique concrete' experiments at French national radio, using turntables before tape. The shift to tape and the founding of the WDR Studio in Cologne (1951) under Herbert Eimert, the GRM in Paris, and Milan's Studio di Fonologia (1955) under Luciano Berio and Bruno Maderna gave the practice institutional homes. Tape music was the dominant form of electronic composition until digital tools displaced it in the 1980s.

Do not try to identify sources. Follow the transformations — where a single sound is stretched into a drone, where a short fragment is looped into a rhythm, where speed change turns timbre into a different instrument. The splice points are often audible as small clicks; these are part of the texture.

Varese's 'Poeme electronique' (1958), composed for the Philips Pavilion at the Brussels World's Fair. Pierre Henry's 'Variations for a Door and a Sigh' (1963) for the source-transformation approach. Toru Takemitsu's 'Water Music' (1960) for an early Japanese example using natural sound.

Tape-music composers treated sound as physical material — a fragment was a strip of plastic with a definite length on the editing block. Reversing or speed-changing a sound meant cutting and flipping or playing back at a different mechanical speed; the gestural relationship to the medium left audible traces.