Handmade Electronic Music

The Art of Hardware Hacking

Nicolas Collins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429559839
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

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
Starting

CHAPTER 1
Getting Started

Tools and Materials Needed

You will need certain tools and materials to undertake the projects in this book. I have kept your investment to an absolute minimum—none of the fancy test equipment and drawers full of teeny parts found in a typical electronics lab; a few basic hand tools and a modest collection of easily obtainable components will see you through. Each chapter begins with a list of the specific parts needed to build the projects, but you’ll need some general supplies as well.

Listening

Whereas “proper” electronic engineering is typically taught with visual reinforcement—staring at an oscilloscope, meters, or a computer screen—we will work by ear, as befits the development of sonic circuitry. A monitor amplifier thus becomes your primary tool. Several of our experiments entail touching electronic circuitry with damp fingers, and those fingers should be kept far, far away from the 120 or 240 volts streaming into any device with a power cord that attaches to the wall. We also need a fair amount of gain at the input to our amplifier at the beginning of this book, where we make a variety of microphones that have pretty low output levels. A typical pair of battery-powered speakers intended for amplifying a computer or phone does not provide enough boost for these microphone projects, although they could come in very handy when we move on to building our own circuits. Instead, consider acquiring one of those wee bitty guitar amps made by Fender, Marshall, Dan Electro, etc.—they look like the guitarist’s equivalent of a shrunken head (Figure 1.1).

If you are feeling adventurous, an economical and flexible solution is to buy a low-power (< 1 watt) amplifier kit from any of a number of online retailers. These kits include all components, a tidy little printed circuit board, and instructions on where to place which part (Figure 1.2). This is an excellent way to bootstrap your soldering skills while saving some money. Besides the financial and pedagogic advantages of building your own tool, you can connect to these amplifiers using clip leads instead of patchcords, so it’s faster and cheaper to test out your projects. The Altoids tin (which will reappear throughout this book with comet-like regularity) makes a very practical housing for a small circuit board and a 9-volt battery. Or you can pack the circuit board and a speaker into some kind of mini faux guitar amplifier and begin your hacking career by dazzling your friends with your design aesthetic. A few words of caution: certain amplifier chips are more forgiving of operator errors; the new generation of class D amplifier chips and kits are cheap and powerful but easily damaged by shorting the speaker connections (in Chapter 24 we build an amplifier using one of the most robust chip options).

Figure 1.1Some battery-powered mini-amplifiers.

For some of the projects we’ll need a second amplifier, and this one can be AC powered without risk. You have a few options:

• A classic hi-fi stereo amplifier, like your parents used to own. It needn’t be very powerful (10–30 watts) or high quality. Look around the local thrift shops or flea markets or on eBay for a used one. It should have connections on the back for external speakers, rather than built-in speakers like the mini guitar amps.

  

  Figure 1.2A low-power amplifier kit: assembled circuit board (left) and mounted in an Altoids tin (right).

• At the time of writing, there are a large number of small, inexpensive stereo amplifiers on the market. Employing the aforementioned class D technology, these amps are efficient enough to run off a small wall wart power supply. Find one with 10–30 watts per channel and make sure it has connections for external speakers (Figure 1.3).
• Alternatively, you can build your own amplifier using a slightly more powerful version of the amplifier kits described prior (Figure 1.4).

Many of the things we will build produce a very wide range of frequencies. Some of these frequencies are more delicious than others. A cheap graphic equalizer footpedal, such as sold for guitarists, is an excellent tool for separating the yolks from the whites, sonically speaking. Numerous companies make them, and for our purposes they all sound more or less the same—buy the cheapest one you can find.

If you already own a small mixer and a pair of monitor speakers, they will prove useful throughout the book, but there’s no need to run out and buy them at this point.

Figure 1.3Typical low-power class D stereo amplifier.

Figure 1.425-watt amplifier circuit board by Sure (left), housed in case with ventilation holes corresponding to depth soundings of Buzzards Bay (coastal Massachusetts) (right).

Tools

You’ll need some basic hand tools (Figure 1.5). Many might already be in your collection if you’ve ever had to change a washer, wire up a lamp, or serve in the Swiss Army. None are expensive—the only place you might want to splurge a little is on a better-than-terrible soldering iron.

• A soldering iron, with a very fine point, 25–60 watts. Not a soldering gun or anything from the plumber’s section of the hardware store. Don’t get a cheap iron—it makes it very frustrating to learn soldering. Weller makes good ones that are reasonably priced and have replaceable, interchangeable tips.
• Solder—fine, rosin core—not “acid-core” solder, that’s also for plumbers.
• Diagonal cutters, small, for cutting wire and component leads down by the circuit board.
• Wire strippers (unless you have the perfect gap between your front teeth)—simple, adjustable manual kind for light-gauge wire.
• A set of jeweler’s screwdrivers (flat and Phillips)—for opening toys with tiny screws.
• A Swiss Army knife.
• A pair of scissors.
• A cheap digital multimeter, capable of reading resistance, voltage, and current.

  

  Figure 1.5Some handy tools.

• Plastic electrical tape.
• Mini jumper cables with small alligator clips at each end, at least 20 of them—you can never have too many.
• A Sharpie-style fine-tipped permanent marker.
• Some small spring clamps or clothespins.
• A small vise or “third hand” device for holding things while you solder them.
• Basic shop tools—such as a small saw for metal and plastic, files, and an electric drill—are useful when you start to work on packaging.

Parts

As mentioned earlier, at the head of each chapter you’ll find a list of the specific components needed to complete the projects covered (if the list is not self-explanatory, just read on, since each new item is discussed as it comes into use). But here are some of the supplies you’ll need throughout the book. These can readily be obtained from a wide range of online retailers (see Appendix A):

• Lightweight insulated hookup wire, 22–24 gauge, one roll stranded, one roll solid.
• Lightweight shielded audio hookup cable, single conductor plus shield.
• Assortment of standard value resistors, 1/8 or 1/4 watt. Sets are easily and inexpensively available from online retailers. If you want to make the minimum investment, the critical values we use are: 100 Ohm, 1 kOhm, 2.2 kOhm, 10 kOhm, 100 kOhm, and 1 mOhm.
• Assortment of capacitors, in the range of 10 pf to 0.1 uf monolithic ceramic or metal film, and 1 uf to 47 uf electrolytic. These can also be bought in sets, but since they are a little more expensive than resistors, you might prefer to purchase a handful of each of a few different values from across the full range and then replace or supplement them as needed. The most commonly used values in our projects are: 0.01 uf, 0.1 uf, 1.0 uf, 2.2 uf, 4.7 uf, and 10 uf.
• 9-volt battery clips—the things that snap onto the nipples at the end of a battery and terminate in lengths of wire. Get five or more.
• Assorted audio jacks and plugs to mate with other devices, such as the headphone jack on your phone or the input to your amplifier.

Batteries

Because of our core philosophy of avoiding unnecessary electrocution, we will be working exclusively with battery-powered devices. This means we will need a lot of batteries, for your amplifier, toys, radio, and the circuits you make. Please be milieu vriendelijk (a friend of the environment), as the Dutch say, and invest in some rechargeable ones if at all possible. The world’s groundwater will thank you.

Architecture

You’ll need a clean, well-lighted place. It should be well ventilated—soldering throws up some unpleasant fumes. You’ll want a fair amount of table space since hacking has an unfortunate tendency to sprawl (Figure 1.6). The table surface can be damaged by soldering, drilling, and filing, so no Boule inlay please. You need electrical power at the table for your soldering iron and a good strong desk light.

OK, are you feeling ready to hack? First, a few rules to live by …

Figure 1.6A typical wor...