Day 123: Splicing a letter home
36yearsago.com
Vienna 1971—A Student Journal
A year of music, study, travel, sightseeing &
friends.
Day 123
— Splicing a letter home
03-December-1971
(Fri.)
TRANSCRIPT
Began to work on my “letter to my family,” project in
electronic music. Simply, that I want to make a funny
letter, using music and speech, to send home.
Splicing, etc.
REFLECTIONS
An
audio letter. Writing is
passé. Well, not really, but I am recording bits of
audio on tape and splicing together segments to
create a letter for my family. Splicing is the
old-fashioned audio technique of cutting and pasting
audio-tape segments together (with razor blades) to
produce new audio material. I was recording my vocal
letter and then bits of songs and splicing them
together. Since we no longer use magnetic audio tape
as the primary means of recording audio, tape
splicing is a forgotten technique. Today, we record,
edit, cut, copy, and paste audio on our computers,
digitally. We call this digital audio editing. It is
digital splicing.
1971
humor = corny. I found a
tape of this “audio letter” home. It is super-corny.
I would talk to my family and then splice in audio
segments from pop songs that I brought with me on
cassettes. Sometimes you can’t understand the words
in the song, and other times it’s just corny,
regardless. In general, the whole letter is corny.
It's interesting to realize that what you thought was
funny or cool when you were young, is no longer funny
or cool. Ha.
It’s
the thought. Yes, it’s
the thought that counts, thankfully. I’m certain that
my family enjoyed it (or probably thought that I was
now taking drugs). 
John
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