Handmade Electronic Music: The Art of Hardware Hacking
Nicolas Collins
Routledge 2006
ISBN 0-415-97592-1
In these days of digital music production – laptop performers GarageBand audio programming environments (Max/ MSP PD supercollider) & iPod DJ’s it’s very easy to forget the simple facts of electronic music. We forget the hidden ugly component parts of our pretty iMacs & Viaos resistors capacitors chips & electrical current which enable us to run our software or download bit torrents were once the direct (analogue) source of sound.
Early electronic music (& the recording of music itself) was born of experimenting artists & engineers patiently listening to the bleeps swoops and crackles of electricity as it flowed through components loving soldered together by hand. The early pioneers of electronic music had to build their own instruments from scratch finding new sounds as they went inventing entirely new musical languages & forms pulling new sounds from the ether.
