Running with Music

The work is an ensemble sculpture made of several 1980s-style boom boxes, rebuilt so they no longer contain tape cartridges. The cassette mechanisms are modified to expose the playback heads and transport wheels that read magnetic tape routed outside the machines. The tape is no longer a contained medium — it becomes a long, shared score, stretched through physical space.

As a participant moves while carrying a boom box, the motion mechanically pulls the external tape across the play head, generating sound. Speed becomes tempo, distance becomes pitch, and the body becomes the transport.

The piece can be staged as a walking or running orchestra. A single song is decomposed into audio stems, one per boom box, like isolated tracks in a multitrack recording. Each participant plays only their assigned part: drums, bass, melody, vocals, noise, harmony, and fragments that mean little on their own but combine into coherent music when the group moves together at the same speed and in alignment on the tape.

Coordination is the composition. Synchronization is the mix. Music exists only when people move in cooperation. When one person drifts, the song degrades, revealing the system’s delicate interdependence.

The sculpture turns private listening into public choreography, rewriting the cassette not as a memory device, but as a negotiation between bodies, machines, motion, and group rhythm.