With the content of the letters being so old yet memorialised by its existence on paper, looping the final words on a cassette tape felt appropriate. The typical cassette sound is warbly and noisy, with the cassette becoming obsolete in the 2000s and sounding so distinctive, cassettes now sound old and nostalgic. I think using this old, nostalgic-feeling cassette as a carrier for the words sonically emulates the old nostalgic-feeling of the letters. Looping the final words of the letter allows them to ring on forever; to me, this was the emotion of the final letter.
There are many online tutorials for creating cassette tape loops. This is due to the widespread usage of tape loops for ambient and experimental music, as well as the accessibility tape has. I started by skimming through a few videos on how to make a tape loop. It seemed fairly simple, so to begin with, I took the casing off, removed the tape and cut off a length and taped it into a loop, and attempted to loop it around as shown in the “10-second tape” video however I had not stuck the tape together on the correct side so when this loop passed through the tape player it would stop at the join every time. I was not aware that this would be a problem, so I sat and watched another video, which taught me that I needed to stick the tape together from the inside of the tape, to locate the inside of the tape you lay down the tpe and it will curve naturally in a way that allows you to locate the correct side to use sticky tape on. After this, I created a 5-second tape loop using the one-reel method that the second video I watched displayed, I made the loop and put it in the player to test it and realised soon that whenever I pressed play, the play button would spring back up shortly after, only making it loop round once, to solve this issue I instinctively held the play button down for longer than the duration of the loop, this made the loop continue and without stopping. I recorded my voice reading the final letter onto the loop, the result was a warbly tape loop that slows down and speeds up, an interesting distortion of my voice that I was quite pleased with.
I will experiment further than this by creating more loops. I will attempt to make the 10-second loop again; 10 seconds allows for more experimentation with rhythm and leaves room for background sound. I will also experiment on the one-reel loop by using different lengths of tape, slightly longer than the functioning loop I made, which had quite taut tape. In an installation setting, the more tapes I have to hand, the better; if an issue arises and the loop breaks, the quickest fix would be to simply put another loop in. I will also experiment with the location of recording; if I record outside, some interesting background sounds could be included within the loop.
Going forward, I will also be thinking about how I will present the work. I think the letters do need to be displayed with the notes; however, I do need to think about how these can be presented most effectively.