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  • Language Master:Its Master's Voice
  • Ed Osborn

The Language Master is an analog tape-recording and playback device designed to aid in speech therapy and language instruction. Instead of being mounted on reels, the audiotape used with the machine is embossed onto a card about 10 inches long (Fig. 2). Material can be easily recorded onto these cards and can then be run through the machine in any sequence, making it convenient to customize the audio content for classroom or laboratory use. Effectively the device is an analog sampler for recording and playback, albeit one limited to about 4 seconds of low-fidelity monophonic sound per card. By manipulating the speed of the cards as they went through the machine, I could vary the pitch and playback of the audio material and in so doing construct a visible and tangible connection to the sound, which served well in performance situations. In other words the device provided an analog tape variation on the scratching techniques of turntablists. The Language Master model that I use dates from the mid-1960s; although it is still in production [1], it is possible that later models do not allow the kinds of practices I take advantage of here.

Using both the mechanical knowledge of the device and the understanding of how it was meant to be used (to aid in the construction of "correct" linguistic expression), I developed a performance built around the ways in which languages both oral and electronic are commingled and transformed. I combined spoken material (mainly non-English terms that have been folded into the language) with samples of pieces important to the development of taped music. The piece, Language Master (early years), grows out of the evolving syntax of recorded audio and speech framed by the possibilities that the recording process allows. Samples from language lessons, Marinetti, Walter Ruttman, Richard Maxfield, Alvin Lucier and Kevin Coyne, among many others, are heard as the piece develops. Given the low fidelity and uneven tape speed of the machine, most of these samples sound quite degraded even before they are actively manipulated, the result of the acoustic signature of the Language Master machine imprinting itself onto the sounds as it records them.


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Fig. 2.

The Language Master device, dating from the mid-1960s. A sample card is shown sliding through the playback slot.

Photo © Ed Osborn

The physical manipulations of the cards as they play (pulling and pushing them to change to playback speed or repeat short parts of the sounds) can be heard as the constellation of beeps and tearing sounds that interrupt the other recorded sounds. In addition, the audio material is run through a constantly shifting delay line, thus allowing a bit of layering of the sound to occur and articulating an unsteady area between the one-sound-at-a-time methodology of classic musique concrète and the ubiquitous overdub mixes and remixes of contemporary music practice.

I have also used the Language Master as a more generic instrument in live performance, incorporating a much wider variety of recorded samples. The essential qualities of the initial piece, however, seem much closer to the spirit of the device; the grain of the machine mirroring the grain of the voices it reproduces and the unsteadiness of the electronics reflecting the mutable qualities of the human voice over time. Language Master (early years) functions as a cut-and-splice tape collage that sews together a fragmented sonic history while leaving the stitches intact and audible.

Ed Osborn
Department of Art, Baskin Visual Arts, University of California at Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA 95064, U.S.A. E-mail: <edo@ucsc.edu>.
Received 10 January 2005.

Acknowledgment

Thanks to Eric Theise, who surmised that I would know what to do with his flea-market find.

Reference

1. See <www.language-master.co.uk>. [End Page 73]
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