Meet the Crudman from Crudlabs in Brooklyn, New York.
From their webpage:
Hello. This is the Crudlabs CRUDMAN. It is a monophonic, tape-based instrument designed around a single cassette Walkman. It is not designed to replace a Mellotron and it does not sound like a Mellotron. It's its own thing which has its own sound and features. It is a new instrument and a tool to find new and interesting musical and atonal sounds using the unique characteristics of cassette tapes.
The Crudman is based around a Walkman which has been elaborately hacked so that a tape of a looped or droning sound (or any other sound) can be precisely sped up or slowed down via Midi or 1v/octave CV to accurately hit notes over a range of 3 octaves.
The Crudman can provide endless atonal soundscapes but has been designed specifically to be accurate enough can function as a traditionally melodic musical instrument. You can record anything onto a tape, so if you're a fan of the sound and idiosyncrasies of tape, the possibilities are pretty much endless. If you want to play melodies like any other synthesizer, just put in a tape tuned to C, and you play all the way from C two octaves down, to C one octave up - 3 whole octaves. If you want to make new atonal sounds with the singular qualities of analog cassette tape, just put in a tape with literally any music or sounds on it, and see what happens.
Interesting processing tool - the spoken word comes out quite strange. Lots of samples at the site.
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