A Solder's Tale: Putting the “Lead” Back in “Lead Users”
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MOBILE AND UBIQUITOUS SYSTEMS www.computer.org/pervasive A Solder’s Tale: Putting the “Lead” Back in “Lead Users” Nicolas Collins Vol. 7, No. 3 July–September 2008 This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder. © 2008 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE. For more information, please see www.ieee.org/web/publications/rights/index.html. THE HACKING TRADITION A Solder’s Tale: Putting the “Lead” Back in “Lead Users” A composer’s view of the history of hardware hacking, contrasting the aesthetic implications of circuitry and software. nce upon a time, computers that this switch transformed a recording device were not pervasive. Lead users into a performance instrument. The buttons used lead solder instead. Or at and knobs that would normally initiate and least they did in my fi eld: exper- adjust the direct transfer of acoustic sound to imental and electronic music. tape became the interface for manipulating elec- OMainframe computers didn’t fi t into instrument tronic sounds.) I was smitten by the siren call cases; homemade circuits did. of electronic music but unable to afford any of With the emergence of microcomputers in the instruments available at the time: Moogs, the late 1970s, the action began to shift from Arps, and Buchlas synthesizers were still the hardware to software. But today, after three playthings of pop stars and universities. decades of increasingly digital musical culture, Integrated circuits, on the other hand—the analog circuitry has experienced something of a guts of those costly machines—were getting comeback. Circuit bending, hardware hacking, cheaper in inverse proportion to their sophis- and visual artists’ enthusiasm for things physi- tication. These chips contained 90 percent of cal have fostered a revival of interest in tactile a functional circuit designed by someone who alternatives to software. really knew what he (almost all of the engineers Nicolas Collins This article traces the his- at the time were male) was doing; the remain- The School of the Art Institute tory of my engagement post- ing 10 percent could be fi lled in by someone of Chicago Cagean music, with an eye to- clueless, like myself. The trick was fi nding the ward technological innovation right chips and application notes. In the days and its aesthetic implications. before the World Wide Web, information was much more compartmentalized, with precious When circuits ruled few leaks. When data did trickle down from the It’s a familiar enough story: as a teenage musi- engineers to amateurs through hobbyist mag- cian, I was undistinguished at best, but the pop azines, it was passed from hand to hand like music of the late 1960s drew me to electronic samizdat literature. sound. In 1971, having reached the limits of My first chip was a Signetics SE/NE 566 what I could accomplish with a guitar, fl ute, Phase Locked Loop (www.datasheetarchive. and fuzzbox, I bought a used Tandberg reel-to- com/NE566-datasheet.html). Intended as the reel tape recorder. It contained a hidden, un- bleating heart of the (then novel) Touch-Tone documented switch that, when thrown, induced telephone, this was an “oscillator on a chip.” delicious, semicontrollable swoops of feedback. Although not quite so versatile as one from Rob- (What strikes me as signifi cant in retrospect is ert Moog’s hand, at US$5, it was considerably 32 PERVASIVE computing Published by the IEEE CS ■ 1536-1268/08/$25.00 © 2008 IEEE cheaper. (Years later, I discovered that performance, such as ensemble inter- bined the affordable electronics with this same IC was the heart of the elec- action and acoustical sensitivity.2 It re- which I was familiar, the architectural tronic sruti box, Paul DeMarinis’ fi rst conceived the musical score as a task to acoustics that Lucier brought to my at- circuit, and David Behrman’s extraor- be solved and, despite Lucier’s aversion tention, and a classic minimalist, task- dinary homemade synthesizer. This to the term, depended heavily on what oriented score. Through this work and one chip might have been to the devel- could only be termed “improvisation.” other feedback pieces, I learned that opment of American electronic music For me, this latter trait was the fi nal new instruments and sound materials what the Stratocaster was to the rise of piece of the puzzle: the link between often suggest new musical forms—the rock and roll.) the “high art” of the European clas- architecture determines the tuning and My chip sat regally in the center of an sical tradition (in which even a mav- scale, for example—at the same time oversized prototyping circuit board, en- erick like Lucier was deeply rooted) that they rule out conventional ones.4 cased in a phenomenally ugly (yet to me very professional looking) metal box with a crinkly matte-black fi nish, fes- My approach to design lay somewhere tooned with orange Dymo labels that offi ciously designated the mismatched between a Jasper Johns-ian version knobs, switches, and jacks as “pitch,” “on,” “output,” and so forth. Ugly or of “reverse engineering” and a simian typing not, this box not only made electronic music the moment I turned it on, it pool’s attempt at Shakespeare. also twisted truisms that might other- wise scare off a young experimentalist: and all those other musical genres in I continued to build my own cir- anything worth doing is worth doing which I felt more comfortable, such cuits. Possessing neither the instinct wrong, and two wrongs can make a as pop, blues, and jazz. I posited that nor the intellectual tools for a proper right—these became my house rules the breakthrough character of a piece study of electrical engineering, I picked for hardware hacking. like Vespers was inextricably bound up knowledge piecemeal: I scrutinized The last few months of high school to the abandonment of traditional designs in engineering journals; I stole were spent in my bedroom—with a instruments, with all their “cultural bench space in a physics lab; I sat at microphone, the warped Tandberg baggage” (to disinter a cliché of the Behrman’s feet during his artist’s res- recorder, and this oscillator—mak- time) and the embrace of new elec- idency; and eventually I joined David ing electronic music. My instruments tronic resources. Tudor’s “Composers Inside Electron- were crude but eminently playable. Yet Inspired by Lucier’s example, I dis- ics” group.5 I played for an audience of none in my carded all the instruments and many My approach to design lay some- parent’s apartment, while the pop mu- of the musical preconceptions I had where between a Jasper Johns-ian sic I knew and loved was fi lling concert brought with me to college and began version of “reverse engineering” (take halls and clubs. I wanted to take elec- developing new electronic tools of my something apart, copy it, make a vari- tronic music out of the bedroom, but I own, suitable for live performance. ation, see if it still works, try another didn’t know where to start. Some were simply adaptations or re- variation, and so on) and a simian confi gurations of familiar devices, such typing pool’s attempt at Shakespeare Interaction and improvisation as a speaker and microphone set up to (random component substitution.) In the fall, I started college at Wesleyan feed back. In my composition Pea Soup I blew up a lot of chips but became University and met Alvin Lucier, a com- (1974–76), for example, a self-stabiliz- quite profi cient at a few specifi c types poser who didn’t own a piano, didn’t ing network of phase shifters nudges of circuits that were useful in my mu- write for conventional instruments the pitch of audio feedback to a dif- sic (if nobody else’s). (much less play one), and yet had an ac- ferent resonant frequency every time The instruments I made shared a few tive career as a “composer/performer.” feedback starts to build, replacing the defi ning characteristics. They could all be His 1969 work, Vespers, in which familiar shriek with unstable patterns played: their sounds could be articulated blindfolded players use hand-held, of hollow tones.3 It’s a site-specifi c raga continuously in “real time” (in other click-emitting sonar devices to navigate refl ecting the room’s acoustical person- words, I didn’t have to record them and through the performance space,1 bore ality. These architectural melodies can then edit them on tape to achieve my mu- no obvious resemblance to any existing be infl uenced by moving in the space, sical goals.) form of music. Yet somehow it embod- making other sounds, or even letting in At the same time, they were diffi cult ied the essential characteristics of live a draft of cold air. In Pea Soup, I com- to control precisely—the sounds the au- JULY–SEPTEMBER 2008 PERVASIVE computing 33 THE HACKING TRADITION Figure 1. David Behrman’s Kim 1 microcomputer. (image courtesy of David Behrman) From soldering to programming By the mid-1970s, the fi rst affordable microcomputers came onto the mar- ket.