Sonic Fabric gives recycled audio cassettes new life

Photo courtesy www.sonicfabric.com

Whatever happened to all those cassette tapes we used to have lying around?  Remember when you had to flip a tape over to hear the other half of the music?  Bad experiences with leaving the tapes lying in the sun? Or what about the older tapes that you played so much that the tape would get loose and start jamming up in the cassette player.  Did you ever wonder what happened to all those leftover audio cassettes?  As they say, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. 

Sonic Fabric has created a unique “playable” fabric that is woven out of the audio tape from the inside of the cassettes.  It’s playable because the tape retains its magnetic quality throughout the weaving process.  According to the fabric’s creator all you have to do is run a tape head over it, connected to headphones to be able to “hear” what’s on the fabric.   A Sonic Rhythm stage dress was created for phish percussionist Jon Fishman, made from his own personal collection of cassette tapes.  Jon had gloves with tape heads mounted in them for playback on stage.

The concept itself is beautiful — a cross between the imagination of a child watching tell-tail cassette tape streamers on the back of a boat while thinking about the music that was on those tapes, and Tibetan Buddhist prayer flags with blessings to be  sent off into the world, carried by the wind.  The fact that the finished product is “playable” wasn’t really considered during its creation.  The idea was simply to record a collage of music onto the cassette tapes with personal meaning, that could then be turned into a wearable object.

You can read more about the project and order products directly at Sonic Fabric.