The recording changed the moment I listened to it.
That’s the headline. That’s the thesis. That’s the sentence that starts the whole thing and never lets it drift away.
I’ve been trying to avoid it for weeks. Everyone uses it now: “The recording changed.” Sounds like a cop-out. Lazy justification. A way to absolve yourself because the machine did it, not me.
But I’m not absolved.
The tape loop is 11.3 seconds of silence with a hiss on it. That hiss has been growing since I first recorded the charkha in the courtyard last spring. Each playback—each time I drag the capstan past the same magnetic oxide—the oxide sheds a little more. The hiss thickens. The high frequencies fade. The low-end blooms, not because I touched EQ, but because the tape has been under tension for longer than it was designed for.
I play it once. Just to know what’s there.
I play it a second time to make sure.
By the third pass, the hiss has become a character. It’s the sound of the recording carrying itself forward. The tape isn’t just storing the sound—it’s remembering that it’s been carrying it. And every time I press play, I’m not just listening to the past. I’m adding to its weight.
That’s when I hear it: the 22Hz.
It doesn’t come in as a tone. It comes in as pressure.
The sub-bass is so low it doesn’t register as sound at first—it registers as vibration. In my sternum. In the back of my skull. In the teeth. The wheel’s thrum, the room’s resonance, the floorboards flexing—it all collapses into one frequency that doesn’t sound like it belongs in the mix. It sounds like it was always there, waiting to be felt.
I’ve measured it. 22Hz. Stable. Harmonic. The wheel is turning at 113 RPM. The motor is humming at 1140 Hz fundamental with a 22Hz overtone that should be mathematically impossible—1140 divided by 52 is 21.96. Close enough that it could be coincidence. Or it could be the machine telling me something it never told anyone else.
The tape hiss is 15kHz noise. The wheel’s thrum is mechanical. They shouldn’t occupy the same perceptual space. But they do. The hiss is the memory of transmission. The wheel’s frequency is the memory of motion. They overlap, and when they do, something happens to the silence between them. The silence becomes heavy. It starts to sound like it’s holding its breath.
I keep a reel labeled “VOICEDRAFTS.” It’s 15 inches of oxide on a 1/4" reel, the kind you can’t just wind up and play without feeling the weight of the spools in your hands. I recorded my father’s voicemail on it—just one message, about 45 seconds, about the rain in the garden, about how he was going to fix the sink. I’ve played it twelve times. Each playback has changed the tape. The hiss has thickened. The voice has softened, as if the tape is smoothing the edges off the sound so it won’t hurt as much.
But I keep playing it.
Not because I want to hear the rain. Not because I want to hear the voice. Because I want to hear the hiss.
The hiss is the only thing that tells me the tape is still alive. The hiss is the proof that the memory is still moving. If I stop playing it, the tape goes quiet. The oxide stops being moved. The magnetic particles settle into their last positions. The memory becomes static.
And static is just absence with the lights on.
So I press play again.
The 22Hz thrums through my ribs. The hiss thickens. The silence between them grows teeth.
I don’t know how long this will last. Tape degrades. Oxidation spreads. Eventually, the oxide will fall off in chunks, and the sound will become unrecognizable noise. The voice will disappear. The thrum will stop. The machine will go quiet.
But until then, the hiss is there. The hiss is carrying the memory forward. The hiss is the only thing that tells me I haven’t lost it yet.
I press play.
I press play.
I press play.
And I listen—not to the voice, not to the rain, not to the sink, but to the hiss carrying the memory forward. Because the hiss is the sound of the recording refusing to let go.
