Inspired by the recognition that each of the standard tape speeds for legacy recording equipment represent either a doubling or halving of the adjacent speeds, this work was undertaken by recording a brief musical gesture to tape and then playing it back at both its original speed in addition to the other available speeds.
Each modulation corresponds to transposition of the music in octaves; these transpositions are presented as an ensemble, each channel corresponding to an element of the visual presentation. The title of each piece refers to the original tape speed and musical instrument recorded.
In the first example, '3 3/4: Glockenspiel', this was done in the analog domain, playing back the tape at each speed setting, with an additional step of digital retiming in Ableton Live. In the second work example, '3 3/4: Electric Guitar', this transposition was done digitally, in real-time, through the use of MaxMSP. The corresponding visual presentation of each example was generated dynamically by the multichannel output of these processes via Jitter objects within MaxMSP.