Monotype is a casting system for producing moveable metal type using a keyboard, punch-tape and matrix (mould). Patented in 1885, this revolutionary technology greatly improved the speed and often quality, of typesetting for Letterpress printing.
Due to the complexity of the Monotype system it is almost impossible to take a punch-tape from an unknown printing house and decode the text which has been encoded onto it. There are approximately 30,000 possible arrangements of the moulds which correspond to the holes punched in the tape according to the needs of the job at hand.
Here, the binary holes in a found punch-tape, originally representing intended letters and spaces, have been mapped to MIDI sound events transcoding the language of mechanical typesetting into a musical space, using legacy typesetting materials to drive musical sequences. In parallel, a matrix of LEDs relate the entire process as a string of sequenced letters making words and sentences.

This prototype study has been written in Processing using the MIDIbus Library and Arduino toolkit. This work would not be possible without the support of the Open Source community.