Instead of melting the cassettes, I decided I would glue the cassettes together and make the shape a little more geometric and angular.
The top part would be a pentagonal prism with one of sides open halfway down for the cassette player to stick out. Four sides has 6 cassettes glued together flat and the fifth side has 4 cassettes glued together flat. The bottom would almost be a sphere but more angular. Each section of the bottom would have 4 pairs of 2 cassettes glued flat and the 4 pairs would be glued together on an angle.
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This section 5 times around the bottom.
The bottom would be hollow so speakers could go in there.
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Top section of new plan
Wire added to hold cassette player
I also started to work on altering the cassette player so that the tape head would sit on top where the bow could be drawn across it. I had to take the door and the door clip off. The cassette player looked similar to this one.
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Then I had to cut off part of the cover that is over the where the tape head is so that I could bring the tape head up. I hot glued the tape head to the side of the player, beside the buttons.
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I had the top part together and half of the bottom part attached to the top part (the amount in the sketch below) but it was not very stable. I was not happy with how this was turning out. When I brought what I had done so far to one of the in class critiques, I mentioned how I was unhappy with it and Mike said that he thought my remade cassette player was already an instrument alone and looked strong enough without the cassette sculpture. So I decided to ditch the idea of the cassettes and started focusing on the cassette player more. Originally, because I thought the cassette player would be hidden, I hadn’t really thought of anything other than it being functional.
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I also had to make the bow that would hold the tape. When I bought the cassette player, it came with a pair of old headphones and I wanted to use them for some part. I broke the ear pieces off where they adjust and cut the cords apart where they connected so that I had two separate ear phones with wire still attached. Then I held one ear phone onto a wooden dowel and wrapped the cord around the dowel tightly and repeated for the other end. I chose the tape that I wanted to use for the bow and measured out how long I needed. I cut the tape to fit the dowel and attached each end of the tape to a reel. I glued the reels to the ear phones on each end of the dowel and painted the whole bow black.
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I painted the cassette player black and painted acrylic sealer over top of the black paint. I added two little feet to help it stand on its own and I also added two guides to the back of the tape head to prevent the tape from slipping off. I painted the symbols back onto the correct buttons.
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