Walden; or, Life in the Woods

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862),
published in 1854

• Emphasizing simplicity and self-sufficiency
• Turning away from industrialized mass society
• Insights for modern DIY philosophy

From self-sufficiency to counterculture

DIY evolved from practical necessity to philosophical stance:

• 1940s–50s: Post-war home improvement boom (returning soldiers, suburban expansion)
• 1960s: Counterculture reframes DIY as anti-establishment practice
• 1970s–80s: Punk DIY ethics ("anyone can do it")
• 2000s: Maker movement merges craft with digital fabrication

Do-It-Yourself (DIY)

Documented in Suburban Life magazine in 1912, do it yourself describes practical work undertaken without professional services:

• self-reliance in rural and domestic life
• repair and reuse of available materials
• independent learning through practical experience

Professional craft and DIY

In home improvement, German distinguishes Handwerker and Heimwerker:

• Craftsperson (Handwerker): trained professional offering skilled services
• DIY practitioner (Heimwerker): non-professional working independently for personal use

Maker movement and infrastructure

Since the 2000s, maker culture has connected DIY practice with digital fabrication:

• shared workshops: hackerspaces, makerspaces and Fab Labs
• accessible platforms: Arduino, Raspberry Pi and similar development boards
• networked knowledge: project documentation, repositories and online communities

The Fab Lab network emerged from MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms in the early 2000s.

Open hardware and maker ecosystem

Reasons for making

• Creative expression and leisure
• Learning and technical autonomy
• Cost savings, repair and resource efficiency
• Environmental responsibility

DIY as social critique

Since the 1960s, DIY has also expressed:

• resistance to mass consumption and corporate control
• active examination and appropriation of technology
• alternatives to closed and standardized products

Do It Together (DIT)

DIT shifts DIY from individual production to collaborative learning and construction:

• share knowledge rather than proprietary secrets
• solve technical problems collectively
• broaden access to tools and practical education

Examples: repair cafés, tool libraries, makerspaces, open-source communities and music collectives

How-To

DIY knowledge is shared through instructions and project documentation:

• Making-of documentation: reflects on processes, problems, and solutions
• Magazines and online platforms: make practical knowledge accessible

DIY online

The internet turns practical knowledge into reusable instructions:

• Project documentation: Instructables and specialist blogs
• Discussion communities: forums and Reddit
• Video demonstrations: YouTube
• Open repositories: GitHub

DIY in musical practice

Artists build, modify and repurpose instruments when existing technologies do not provide the required sounds or forms of interaction:

• Build: custom instruments and circuits (Mumma, Tudor)
• Prepare: conventional instruments and playing mechanisms (Cage)
• Hack: commercial electronics through circuit modification

→ Technical construction becomes a source of musical form and aesthetic identity.

Extended techniques

DIY approaches expand acoustic instruments beyond their conventional design:

• prepare or modify instruments to alter resonance and timbre
• build alternative interfaces and playing mechanisms
• use amplification, contact microphones and found materials

Subverting technology

DIY electronics treats technology as material rather than as a finished product:

• Deconstruct: Open devices to understand how they behave.
• Repurpose: Use components beyond their intended function.
• Circuit-bend: Introduce new connections and discover unintended sounds.

→ The objective is not only repair, but new behaviour.

Process as composition

Construction defines a system rather than a fixed sonic result:

• material intervention: objects, instruments and circuits become playable
• open conditions: scores and setups frame actions without fixing every sound
• performance systems: technology, performer and acoustic space interact

→ Connecting, testing and listening form part of the compositional process.

DIY pioneers in experimental music

• Sonic Arts Union: Robert Ashley, David Behrman, Alvin Lucier and Gordon Mumma developed portable, individually constructed electronic systems. Mumma described his adaptive live-electronic approach as Cybersonics.

• Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T., founded 1966): brought artists including John Cage, David Tudor and Robert Rauschenberg into collaboration with engineers and emerging technologies.

Rainforest IV (1973)

Rainforest IV is an immersive performance-installation by David Tudor in which repurposed objects function as resonant “instrumental loudspeakers,” creating a spatial sound environment.

Crackle Box (Michel Waisvisz)

Circuit bending and hardware hacking

Circuit bending, associated with Reed Ghazala, opens battery-powered sound toys through exploratory short-circuiting:

• discover connections by listening rather than following a fixed schematic
• make the results playable with switches, controls or body contacts
• treat consumer devices as open systems rather than sealed “black boxes”

Safety: use only low-voltage, battery-powered devices, never mains-powered equipment.

DIY electronics as artistic practice

Nicolas Collins

• connects hardware hacking with experimental composition in Handmade Electronic Music
• teaches practical circuit-hacking workshops

John Richards / Dirty Electronics

• develops participatory instruments through collective making
• critiques consumer-oriented maker culture through “beyond DIY”

Victorian Synthesizer (John Bowers)

Scraping the rod across the file rapidly opens and closes the circuit.

Logic chips for sound creation

Lunetta synthesizers

The term Lunetta synthesizer refers to CMOS-based instruments associated with the work of American percussionist and sound artist Stanley Lunetta (1937–2016).

• low-cost, widely available components
• immediate results from simple circuits
• tactile controls that encourage experimentation
• designs that remain open to modification

Electro-Music forum: Lunettas, circuits inspired by Stanley Lunetta ↗

Logic signals

CMOS circuits use two voltage ranges as binary states:

• LOW corresponds to 0
• HIGH corresponds to 1
• repeated switching between LOW and HIGH produces a square wave

At audio frequencies, the switching becomes audible as a tone.

Interactive demonstration: logic signal ↗

Common logic gates

A logic gate maps one or more binary inputs to a binary output. Its truth table defines the relation between inputs and output.

• NOT: inverts the input
• AND: HIGH only when both inputs are HIGH
• OR: HIGH when one or both inputs are HIGH
• NAND: inverted AND
• XOR: HIGH when the inputs differ

Interactive demonstration: logic gates ↗

Reading an integrated circuit

Breadboard and internal conductive pathways

Oscillator: water analogy

Within limits, voltage can be compared to water pressure and current to water flow:

• the capacitor stores charge like a vessel stores water
• the resistor restricts current like a narrow pipe restricts water flow
• as the vessel fills, the capacitor voltage rises
• the circuit switches, the vessel drains, and the cycle repeats

→ A narrower pipe (higher resistance) or larger vessel (higher capacitance) slows the cycle and lowers the frequency.

Interactive demonstration: shishi-odoshi ↗

From oscillator to instrument

An oscillator becomes playable when its frequency can be controlled. Additional logic can modify, combine, divide, and route its output:

• sensors and variable resistors control pitch
• logic gates shape, gate, and combine signals
• dividers and counters create subharmonics and pulse patterns
• selectors and sequencers route signals into repeating structures

A light-controlled oscillator

Gated oscillator (CD4093)

Ring modulation with logic (CD4070)

Proto-instrument

Instrument building is an evolving artistic practice that blurs making, playing and composing:

• building becomes part of artistic expression and performance
• musical and aesthetic decisions emerge as the instrument develops

Circuitry-Based Sound: circuits and workshop documentation ↗

Literature

• Collins, Nicolas. Handmade Electronic Music: The Art of Hardware Hacking. 3rd ed., Routledge, 2020.

• Ghazala, Reed. Circuit-Bending: Build Your Own Alien Instruments. Wiley, 2005.

• Gold, Helmut, Annabelle Hornung, Verena Kuni, and Tine Nowak, editors. DIY: Die Mitmach-Revolution. Ventil Verlag, 2011.

• Richards, John. “Beyond DIY in Electronic Music.” Organised Sound, vol. 18, no. 3, 2013, pp. 274–281, https://doi.org/10.1017/s1355771813000241.

• Richards, John. “DIY and Maker Communities in Electronic Music.” The Cambridge Companion to Electronic Music, 2017, pp. 238–257, https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459874.015.

Literature

• Richards, John. “Getting the Hands Dirty.” Leonardo Music Journal, vol. 18, 2008, pp. 25–31, https://doi.org/10.1162/lmj.2008.18.25.

• Kori, Lisa, and David Novak. “Handmade Sound Communities.” Handmade Electronic Music, 2020, pp. 393–405, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429264818-42.

• Ashley, Robert. “Gordon Mumma: ‘I’m Using the By-Product of My Culture.’” Music with Roots in the Aether: Interviews with and Essays about Seven American Composers. Edition MusikTexte, 2000, pp. 99–108.

• Sipos, Regina, and Kerstin Franzl. “Tracing the History of DIY and Maker Culture in Germany’s Open Workshops.” Digital Culture & Society, vol. 6, no. 1, 2020, pp. 109–120, https://doi.org/10.14361/dcs-2020-0106.

Websites

• Richards, John. Dirty Electronics, www.dirtyelectronics.org/index.html. Accessed 13 June 2024.
• Schwarz, Lorenz. Circuitry-Based Sound. Version 1.0, Zenodo, 19 Apr. 2026, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19653676.
  Repository: https://github.com/SCLW/Circuitry-Based-Sound.
• Nicolas Collins: Handmade Electronic Music, www.nicolascollins.com/handmade.htm. Accessed 19 Dec. 2025.

Third-party materials

These notices cover third-party assets reproduced locally. Original course material is covered by the course CC BY 4.0 license.

Public-domain and source-based material

• Henry David Thoreau, Walden; or, Life in the Woods (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1854), p. 54 — itemised house-cost table from “Economy”; Boston Public Library, digitized by the Internet Archive; public domain; vector reconstruction by Lorenz Schwarz

Third-party materials II

Material licensed under CC BY 4.0

• Prepared pianos, Donaueschinger Musiktage, 17 October 1954 — photograph by Willy Pragher; Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg, Staatsarchiv Freiburg, W 134 Nr. 039530a
• Crackle Box — photograph by Till Kniola, 2021
• "Victorian Synthesizer" demonstration — photograph by Fangchao Bi
• Performance at ZKM, 2021 — photograph by Paul Modler
• Circuit Bending Workshop — photograph by Paul Modler
• From schematic to breadboard to sound — illustration by Yunfei Zhang, 2025
• Circuitry-Based Sound, 2023 — photograph by Hoin Ji