Tape Decay

Tape Decay is an exhibit inspired by an interest in how memory works in the modern age. In the digital era, where anything can be captured with the click of a button, memories are much easier to preserve. However, even these technological surrogates are vulnerable to decay and will disappear eventually one day.

This mortality is immediately and viscerally audible in the unique quality of analog recorded sound, which is defined as much by its imperfections as by its fidelity.

When we hear the crackle of a vinyl record or the warble of a cassette tape, we are transported to the past, even if we didn’t grow up with these technologies. The traces of a medium struggling to fully preserve what was recorded and the resulting artifacts of years of degradation become potent vehicles for nostalgia and reflections on the instability of memory.

Tape Decay is a Yale College senior thesis project by Grace Halak, a Computing and the Arts Major (Class of 2026), and supported by the Yale Center for Collaborative Arts and Media (CCAM).

Collaborators:

Visual Artist: Noah Shin (Yale College, 2029)

Thesis Advisor: Konrad Kaczmarek (Associate Professor Adjunct, Yale Department of Music)

From the Artist:

Last semester, I developed an interactive audio degradation program inspired by characteristics of analog tape and informed by an intensive suite of experiments on physical tape degradation. I induced various forms of loss and damage onto cassette tapes, analyzed the results, and used them to code a tool that can artfully replicate these states of degradation on any input audio.

To culminate this project, I composed an original score for the short film Fireflies, using my audio degradation program as a creative tool and drawing directly from characteristics of tape decay observed in my experiments. Fireflies, a short film by Noah Shin, explores the unique imperfections of analog media in the visual realm. Composed of digitally rendered scenes that have been printed out, manipulated, and rephotographed frame by frame, Fireflies beautifully uses visual materiality as a conduit for nostalgia and the fragility of memory, themes which are also woven into the score.

In the exhibit, selected scenes from Fireflies are presented in three groups of three, each corresponding to a distinct form of tape degradation analyzed during my experiments. This allows visitors to encounter degradation not as a gradual, invisible process but as a tangible and immediate state. Removed from the linear flow of cinema and held instead in looping stasis, these scenes suspend decay in time, compressing years of material change into a single encounter.

— Grace Halak