One of my favorite assignments from the Graduate Seminar in General Education that I took this spring was our mixtape project. The goal was to get students to directly engage with an outdated format: cassette tapes. The courseheads provided us with blank tapes, and loaned out several tape recorders with varying capabilities.
The assignment was to assemble five tracks (not necessarily music) that had helped us to learn to listen, or that we thought might help someone else learn to listen. Furthermore, an important part of the assignment was coping with the technology: figuring out how to get our recordings (most of which were digital) onto the tapes.
Each person was limited by the type of tape recorder they ended up with. (Some had lines in, some had only microphones, etc.) I got a boombox with a stereo RCA line in (the red and white plugs that you find in the back of your TV, DVD player, video game console, etc). My solution was thus to burn my tracks onto a CD from my computer, play the CD in my DVD player, and run the audio out into the tape deck. I haven't digitized the actual tape yet (I will), but here are the liner notes for my project, with links to the digital files when possible.
Mixtape - February 22, 2013
1. Pink Floyd - "Nobody Home" - sheer perfection. Beautiful, emotional music. Even better, it combines the sad-rockstar-wasting-time-in-hotel-watching-old-movies aesthetic of the middle chunk of The Wall with a series of imagined voices from Pink's past. Listen at the last line for the most perfect interlocking of music and background movie voice. The movie version carries the film idea even farther, although its gets rid of my favorite voices.
2. The guitar solo from Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven." We've all heard the whole thing too many times before, so I'm giving you what matters: 5:54 to 6:43 contain simply the best 48 seconds ever committed to tape, in the history of anything. I will fight you about this.
3. Cantus - Let Your Voice Be Heard - This is a piece of group improvisation--it's semi-organized chaos, based on a series of "loops" which various members of the choir sing, and combined with a clapping game. A listening experience in which voices randomly pop out of the texture. My undergraduate men's chorus sang this, and it was a very unique performing experience -- starting from the basic loops and deviating from them whenever and however you felt like it, if you heard a gap in the texture that you wanted to fill in. The only direction necessary is a signal when the piece is ending.
4. "Operations 2" from System Shock 2: You should listen to this through headphones. I wrote a paper about this a few years back, trying to build up an entire theoretical apparatus around one fleeting impression that I could never really re-create (a brief sensation of nausea, which I thought might be vaguely related to the conflicting stereo streams), and which may not have even been caused by the music anyway. Looking back from a little distance, it reminds me that the way in which you listen (good headphones, bad headphones, stereo speakers, computer speakers) can have profound effects on what you experience.
5. Morphine - "All Wrong" - My dad was a big Morphine fan, and I first heard this in middle school. It's the first song I can remember listening to and thinking, "What...IS that? What is that instrument?" (It plays a solo about 2/3 through). I started playing the saxophone because of this band, and it was eventually my saxophone teacher who was able to tell me that it's a baritone sax, played into a guitar wah-wah pedal. Anyway, the pseudo-acousmatic effect (listening to a sound and having no idea what strange thing produced it) had a profound impact on me.
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