4 Nicolas Collins
Introduction
This book teaches you how to tickle electronics. It is a guide to the creative
transformation of consumer electronic technology for alternative use. We live in
a cut and paste world: Control-X and Control-V give us the freedom to rearrange
words, pictures, video and sound to transform any old thing into our new thing
with tremendous ease and power. But, by and large, this is also an “off-line”
world, whose digital tools, as powerful as they might be, are more suitable to
preparing texts, photo albums, movies and CDs in private, rather than on stage.
These days most “live electronic music” seems to be hibernating, its tranquil
countenance only disturbed from time to time by the occasional, discrete click of
a mouse.
My generation of composers came of age before the personal computer, at a time
when electronic instruments were far too expensive for anyone but rock stars or
universities, but whose building blocks (integrated circuits) were pretty cheap
and almost understandable. A small, merry, if masochistic, band, we presumed
to Do-It-Ourselves. We delved into the arcane argot of engineering magazines,
scratched our heads, swapped schematics, drank another beer, and cobbled
together home-made circuits -- most of them eccentric and sloppy enough to give
a “real” engineer dyspepsia. These folk electronic instruments became the
calling cards of a loose coalition of composers that emerged in the mid-1970s,
after John Cage, David Tudor, and David Behrman, and before Oval, Moby, and
Matmos. By the end of the 1970s the microcomputers that would eventually
evolve into Apples and PCs had emerged from the primordial ooze of Silicon
Valley, and most of us hung up our soldering irons and started coding, but the
odd circuit popped up from time to time, adding spice to the increasingly digital
musical mix.
Computers are wonderful, don’t get me wrong, but the usual interface -- an
ASCII keyboard and a mouse -- is awkward, and makes the act of performing a
pretty indirect activity -- like trying to hug a baby in an incubator. “Alternative
controllers” (such as those made by STEIM and Buchla) are a step in the right
direction, but sometimes it’s nice to reach out and touch a sound. This book lifts
the baby out of the basinet and drops her, naked and gurgling, into your waiting
arms, begging to be tickled.
The focus is on sound -- making performable instruments, aids to recording, and
unusual noisemakers -- though some projects have a strong visual component as
well. No previous electronic experience is assumed, and the aim is to get you
making things as quickly as possible, and keep you alive from start to finish.
After learning basic soldering skills, you will make a variety of listening devices:
acoustic microphones, contact mikes, coils for picking up stray electromagnetic
fields, tape heads. Then you will lay hands upon, and modify, cheap electronic
toys and other found circuitry -- the heart and soul of hacking. You’ll build some
circuits from scratch: simple, robust oscillators that can be controlled through a