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 accounts: reflect 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 become part of composing.

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.

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Logic chips for sound creation

Lunetta synthesizers

Lunetta synthesizers use simple CMOS logic to create custom instruments:

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

Logic gates as equivalent switching circuits

A logic gate maps one or more binary inputs to a binary output. Its truth table defines it completely. Simple on/off switches, open (0) or closed (1), can implement the basic logic operations:

• AND: switches in series, both must be closed (1) for the LED to light
• OR: switches in parallel, either switch closed (1) lights the LED
• NOT (inverter): a switch in parallel with the LED, closed (1) bypasses the LED and turns it off (0)

Interactive demonstration: logic gates ↗

From oscillator to instrument

A simple oscillator produces a square wave. Additional CMOS logic transforms its signal into more complex sounds and temporal structures:

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

Circuitry-Based Sound — circuits and workshop documentation ↗

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

Literature

• Collins, Nicolas. Handmade Electronic Music: The Art of Hardware Hacking. 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 licence.

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 Dr. Paul Modler
• Circuit Bending Workshop — photograph by Dr. Paul Modler
• From schematic to breadboard to sound — illustration by Yunfei Zhang, 2025
• Circuitry-Based Sound, 2023 — photograph by Hoin Ji