For my third project, I also worked alone. In this project was inspired by the genius of Nam June Paik and (then later) the Signal to Noise installation. In my rendition, as I continued with my cassette tape obsession, I tried to create an Analog Tape Playing Guitar. For my materials, I had (again) cassette tapes, a walk man, and a children’s toy guitar. The guitar was symbolic only in the sense that I was trying to create music. The song I wanted played (or at least some distorted version of it) was “I Swear” from the R&B group All-4-One. I wanted to line the flat side of the where the strings are drawn on with cassette tape. I had separated the tape player head from the encasing. I actually deconstructed the walk man too much because and was unable to retrace my steps when I could not get anything to be played. I connected the board of the walk man to the board of the radio, the speaker wires from the walk man’s board to the speaker on the guitar, and so on and so on. At some point while I was working on this and getting nowhere, Larry intervened and offered me some assistance. Despite his efforts, the tape head would not play anything! So in the end, my project did not work the way I wanted it to, although theoretically it should have. I really like the idea of an Analog Tape Playing Guitar, so I plan to continue working on this. I am looking to acquire another walk man/tape deck so that I can start over and better see what I did not the first time. And if that does not work, I will make an audio circuit as another solution.
