Fabric Made from Cassette Tapes Lets You Hear What You Wear

Scroll-Scores

"Much of my work consists of experiments into the intangible… the intuitive, the imaginary, the empathic," says sound and conceptual artist Alyce Santoro. For over 12 years, she has been working with Sonic Fabric, a textile made of 50% repurposed cassette tape and 50% polyester thread. The surface retains its magnetic—and thus, audible—properties. When a tape head is dragged across, the fabric emits muddled, overlapping sounds—the intangible fragments of original recordings.

The idea came to Santoro when learning about Buddhist prayer flags, which are imprinted with images of mantras, sacred sounds that are then meant to be carried by the wind. The flags triggered a childhood memory of sailboat tell-tails, which her family often made with strands of cassette tape. "I used to imagine that if the wind hit the tell-tails just right, the sounds of whatever had been recorded onto the tape […] could be heard wafting out into the air," she writes on her project's website.

Inspired by this connection, she set out to create a fabric that would weave together different music genres, nature sounds, chants and other audio, all along a single, audible surface. This concept is rooted in her broader approach to art-making. She tells The Creators Project: "Like a scientist, I collect samples, analyze them, and convey them in sharable forms. But unlike a scientist, I do not think of myself as a detached, unbiased observer… I see everything that exists as inherently interconnected." Her first Sonic Fabric project, the "Sonic Superhero Dress," was made with 100 cassette tapes ranging from recordings of Beethoven, The Beatles, her high school punk band, and the sounds of ocean surf.

Today the rolls of Sonic Fabric are woven on a 1940s loom at a small textile mill in Rhode Island, and Santoro's body of work has been shown internationally. At the Ringling Museum's Re:Purposed show earlier this year, she played patches of fabric entitled "Scroll-Scores" with a hand-held magnetic tape head. She's created a custom musical suit for Phish percussionist Jon Fishman, and even composed her own experimental music to embed into the fabric. In an effort to make her work more widely available, she also sells sound-emitting neckties, bookmarks, and fabric swatches.

Currently, Santoro is working on a project that looks at the history of experimental music, interviewing composers about the power of sound as an agent of politico-social change. "I hope to collaborate with some of these artists to weave their works into a future edition of Sonic Fabric," she explains.

Sonic Fabric will be featured in the Texas Design Now exhibition, opening August 21 at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. To see more of Alyce Santoro's work, go here.

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