Handmade Electronic Music: The Art of Hardware Hacking

Second Edition. DVD included

Handmade Electronic Music: The Art of Hardware Hacking provides a long-needed, practical, and engaging introduction for students of electronic music, installation and sound-art to the craft of making -as well as creatively cannibalizing- electronic circuits for artistic purposes. Designed for practioners and students of electronic art, it provides a guided tour through the world of electronics, encouraging artists to get to know the inner workings of basic electronic devices so they can creatively use them for their own ends. Handmade Electronic Music introduces the basic of practical circuitry while instructing the student in basic electronic principles, always from the practical point of view of an artist. It teaches a style of intuitive and sensual experimentation that has been lost in this day of prefabricated electronic musical instruments whose inner workings are not open to experimentation. It encourages artists to transcend their fear of electronic technology to launch themselves into the pleasure of working creatively with all kinds of analog circuitry.

CONTENIDO:

Foreword to First Edition by David Behrman
Acknowledgments
Introduction

Part I. Starting
1. Getting Started: Tools and materials needed
2. The seven basic rules of hacking: General advice

Part II. Listening
3. Circuit Sniffing: Eavesdropping on hidden magnetic music
- Art & music 1: Mortal coils
4. In/Out: Speaker as microphone, microphone as speaker - The Symmetry of it all
5. The celebrated jumping speaker of bowers county: Twitching loudspeakers with batteries
6. How to solder: an esential skill
7. How to make a contact Mike: Using Piezo Disks to pick up tiny sounds
- Art & music 2: John Cage - The father of invention
- Art & music 3: Piezo music
8. Turn your tiny wall into a speaker: Resonating objects witn Piezo Disks, transformers, motors and more
- Art & music 4: David Tudor and "Rainforest"
- Art & music 5: Drivers
9. Tape heads: Playing your credit cards
- Art & music 6: Tape
10. A simple air Mike: Cheap condenser Mike Elements make great microphones

Part III. Touching
11. Laying of hands: Transforming a portable radio into a synthesizer by making your skin part of the circuit
- Art & Music 7: The Cracklebox
12. Tickle the Clock: Finding the clock circuit in toys
13. Hack the Clock: Changing the Clock speed for cool new noises
14. Ohm's Law for dummies: How to understand resistors
- Art & music 8: Composing inside electronics
15. Beyond the pot: Photoresistors, pressure pads, and other ways to control and play your toy
- Art & music 9: Circuit bending
16. Switches: How to understand different switches, and even make your own
17. Jack, Batt, and Pack: Powering and packaging your hacked toy

Part IV. Building
18. The World's simplest circuit: six oscillators on a chip, guaranteed to work
19. From breadboard to circuit board: How to solder up your first circuit
20. Getting Messy: Oscillators that modulate each other, feedback loops, theremins, tone controls, instability, clocks for toys, crickets
21. On/Off (More fun with photoresistors): Gating, ducking, tremolo, and Panning
22. Amplification and distorsion: A simple circuit that goes from clean preamp to total distorsion, and an envelope follower
23. Analog to digital conversion, sort of: modulating other audio sources with your circuits, pitch tracking, and sequencers

Part V. Looking
24. Video music/music video: Translating video signals into sound, hacking cheap camera circuits, and extracting sounds from remote controls
- Art & music 10: Visual music
25. LCD Art: Making animated modern dagerreotypes and alternative video projectors

Part VI. Finishing
26. Mixers, matrices, and processing: Very simple, very cheap, very clean mixers, and ways of configuring lots of circuits
27. A little power amplifier: Cheap and simple
28. Analog to digital conversion, really: Connecting sensors to computers using game controllers
- Art & music 11: The luthiers
29. Power Supplies: Carbon Footprints from AA to EEE
30. The future is now

Appendices
A. Resources
B. Tools and materials needed
C. The rules of hacking
D. Notes for the DVD
Notes and references
Illustration Credits