ABSTRACT

Handmade Electronic Music: The Art of Hardware Hacking provides a long-needed, practical, and engaging introduction to the craft of making—as well as creatively cannibalizing—electronic circuits for artistic purposes. With a sense of adventure and no prior knowledge, the reader can subvert the intentions designed into devices such as radios and toys to discover a new sonic world. You will also learn how to make contact microphones, pickups for electromagnetic fields, oscillators, distortion boxes, mixers, and unusual signal processors cheaply and quickly. At a time when computers dominate music production, this book offers a rare glimpse into the core technology of early live electronic music, as well as more recent developments at the hands of emerging artists.

This revised and expanded third edition has been updated throughout to reflect recent developments in technology and DIY approaches. New to this edition are chapters contributed by a diverse group of practitioners, addressing the latest developments in technology and creative trends, as well as an extensive companion website that provides media examples, tutorials, and further reading. This edition features:

  • Over 50 new hands-on projects.
  • New chapters and features on topics including soft circuitry, video hacking, neural networks, radio transmitters, Arduino, Raspberry Pi, data hacking, printing your own circuit boards, and the international DIY community
  • A new companion website at www.HandmadeElectronicMusic.com, containing video tutorials, video clips, audio tracks, resource files, and additional chapters with deeper dives into technical concepts and hardware hacking scenes around the world

With a hands-on, experimental spirit, Nicolas Collins demystifies the process of crafting your own instruments and enables musicians, composers, artists, and anyone interested in music technology to draw on the creative potential of hardware hacking.

part 1|10 pages

Starting

chapter Chapter 1|6 pages

Getting Started

Tools and Materials Needed

chapter Chapter 2|2 pages

The Seven Basic Rules of Hacking

General Advice

part 2|78 pages

Listening

chapter Chapter 3|5 pages

The Victorian Synthesizer

Twitching Loudspeakers

chapter Chapter 4|3 pages

In/Out

Speaker as Microphone, Microphone as Speaker, the Symmetry of It All

chapter Chapter 5|4 pages

How to Solder

An Essential Skill

chapter Chapter 6|8 pages

Circuit Sniffing

Eavesdropping on Hidden Magnetic Music

chapter Chapter 7|14 pages

How to Make a Contact Mike

Using Piezo Disks to Pick Up Tiny Sounds

chapter Chapter 8|13 pages

Turn Your Wall Into a Speaker

Resonating Objects With Transducers, Motors, and More

chapter Chapter 9|7 pages

Paper Speakers

chapter Chapter 10|7 pages

Tape Heads

Play Your Credit

chapter Chapter 11|8 pages

Electret Microphones

Binaural on a Budget

chapter Chapter 12|7 pages

Laying of Hands

Transforming a Radio Into a Synthesizer by Making Your Skin Part of the Circuit

part 3|239 pages

Building

chapter Chapter 13|21 pages

My First Oscillator™

Six Oscillators on a Chip, Guaranteed to Work

chapter Chapter 15|18 pages

Getting Messy

Modulation, Feedback, Instability, and Crickets

chapter Chapter 16|35 pages

Soft Circuitry

An Introduction to E-Textile Interfaces

chapter Chapter 17|14 pages

On/Off (More Fun With Photo Resistors)

Gating, Tremolo, Panning, and More

chapter Chapter 18|13 pages

Mixers and Matrices

Very Simple, Very Cheap, Very Clean Ways of Configuring Lots of Circuits

chapter Chapter 19|12 pages

Boost and Distort

A Simple Circuit That Goes From Clean Preamp to Total Distortion

chapter Chapter 20|14 pages

Analog to Digital Conversion, Sort Of

Modulating Other Audio With Your Circuits, Pitch Tracking, and a Sequencer

chapter Chapter 21|12 pages

Beyond Bending

Triggering, Sequencing, and Modulating Circuit-Bent Toys

chapter Chapter 22|10 pages

Video Hacking

chapter Chapter 23|7 pages

An Introduction to Op Amps

chapter Chapter 24|6 pages

A Little Hacker’s Amp

chapter Chapter 25|7 pages

The Mumma-Tudor Ring Modulator

chapter Chapter 26|8 pages

Paper Circuits

chapter Chapter 27|14 pages

Rule the Airwaves

Build a Radio Transmitter

chapter Chapter 28|16 pages

A Grab Bag of Samples

A Voltage-Controlled Radio Receiver

chapter Chapter 29|8 pages

A Lo-Fi Sampler and Looper

chapter Chapter 30|7 pages

The Bissell Function Block

A Lag Processor

chapter Chapter 31|9 pages

Sounds From Neural Networks

part 4|61 pages

Computing

chapter Chapter 32|20 pages

Sharing Traces

Designing and Fabricating Your Own Printed Circuit Boards With Fritzing

chapter Chapter 33|13 pages

Microcontroller Sound

chapter Chapter 34|13 pages

Small Sound

Pure Data on Raspberry Pi 1

chapter Chapter 35|13 pages

Data Hacking

The Foundations of Glitch Art

part 5|24 pages

Connecting

chapter Chapter 36|13 pages

Handmade Sound Communities

chapter Chapter 37|9 pages

Hello World!