OK, I'm old enough to have worked with cassette tape and its predecessor, reel-to-reel tape, including professional broadcast equipment. And that includes both monophonic and 2- or 4-track stereo.
On a Cassette tape deck the "normal" operation would be to start from the Stop position, then press Rewind and either shut it off yourself by pushing Stop when you choose, or wait for it to stop itself at the end of the tape. In either case, you won't hear nothing - you will hear a low-level motor running sound, and it will slowly increase in frequency. That is because it actually is not the motor sound you hear. It is the sound of the two tape spools turning, and your ear is dominated by the sound from the Take-Up reel that is being emptied by the Rewind operation. The motor is driving the Supply reel at constant rpm, so as the Take-Up reel loses more tape it starts to rotate faster and faster and its sound gets louder and higher-pitched. When you stop it or it stops itself, there would normally be a small "clunk" as the motor's drive mechanism is pulled away from the Supply Reel drive shaft, and the sound of the spinning reel stops instantly.
In the case of jumping quickly from Play to Rewind by simply pushing the button, the mechanical design still would drop the tape back from the head as the drive motor came into contact with the Supply Reel shaft.
During this time there is NO sound of audio from the tape. All commercial tape decks made for retail users are designed to push the tape up against the heads only during Play and Record (and Pauses thereof) functions. By default they are away from the heads in all other cases. I've worked with older broadcast-grade equipment that kept the tape on the heads at all times, and we tried not to run the machines this way too often because of concern for tape head wear and especially tape wear that might damage the recorded signal. Better equipment at that time had the tape clear of the head normally and pushed into contact for record / playback. They also had a manual lever for pushing the tape against the head temporarily (so you could hear fast sound) for cuing purposes. The tape machine had no footage counter, and you sought out sections of recorded material from the distorted high-speed sound or listened for gaps of silence between recorded sections.
Pro-grade equipment allows you to do some things that are prevented in retail equipment, because the pro's do more frequent preventive maintenance on their equipment, and they replace older worn tapes more frequently.
All this does raise the question, though, of whether or not the original assignment really meant what it says. It's kind of a small but nice touch to make a new machine sound like and old familiar one. But if the actual intent was to make you find a way to play the recorded sound backwards, at normal or faster speed (or even, at fast speeds that continually increase), the question was poorly stated. In that case, maybe it even suggests that the question writer did not really know what older machines actually do!