ABSTRACT
The Hex Schmitt Trigger presents a great introduction to making musical circuitry: with just a handful of components and a few minutes of time. The 1970s were a pivotal time in the evolution of the technology and culture of electronic music. Synthesizers were still impractically expensive for young musicians, but integrated circuits—the guts of those costly machines— were getting cheaper in inverse proportion to their sophistication. Christian Terstegge in his 1986 work, Ohrenbrennen , four oscillators are controlled by photocells inside small altar-like boxes containing candles; the pitches of the oscillators rise in imperfect unison, punctuated by swoops that trace the sputtering of the candles as they burn down over the course of a dozen minutes. Toward the end of the 1970s, the first affordable microcomputers came on the market. Cajoled by the visionary Jim Horton, a handful of musicians invested in the Kim-1: a single A4-sized circuit board that resembled an autoharp with a calculator glued on top.
