Hardware Hacking - Nicolas Collins

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 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.

As a result of these koans, this is a distinctly non-standard introduction to electronic engineering. Many of the typical subjects of a basic electronics course, such as the worrisomely vague transistor and the admittedly useful little thing called an op-amp, are left unmentioned. After turning over the last page, you will emerge smarter, if weirder, than when you first opened the book. You will have acquired some rare skills, and ones that are exceedingly useful in the pursuit of unusual sounds. You will have significant gaps in your knowledge, but these gaps can be filled by a less structured stroll through resources easily available in books and on-line (as described in Appendix 1.) And everything electronic you choose to do after this book will be easy, I promise. Why? Because you will be fearless. You will have the confidence to survey those presumptuous “No user serviceable parts inside!” labels and laugh. You will be a hacker.