I called a company which manufactures tape heads today since that seems to be the hardest part of moving forward with this project. https://www.brushindustries.com/ fortunately seems to have something in stock and is semi-local. We'll see if this might work for this project, so hopefully they forward the needed documentation soon.

During the course of the conversation though I learned that some of the heads they make are pretty amazing, such as for this piece:

Apparently this is rated for 7 million swipes! But comes to the tune of ~$500 and is for transit systems and such.

Fortunately, they have something much more reasonable for our purposes.

I found some amplifier circuits and audio bits in the electronics bin and am going to fiddle around trying to kludge together something which makes noise but is smaller.