Third edition of this highly popular book that first came out in 2006. Assuming no technical background whatsoever, the book carries you through a series of sound-producing electronic construction projects, from making simple contact microphones, to transforming cheap electronic toys into playable instruments, to designing circuits from scratch. Along the way, the technologies are put into historical and aesthetic context through information about artists who have used similar devices to make significant musical breakthroughs.

• 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

Collins explains

“In 1999, when I started teaching in the Department of Sound at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, I discovered that my students had adopted the computer as an almost universal tool. They were adept at using their laptops to edit a video, compose a dance track, retouch a photo, lay out a poster, write a term paper, and design a Web site. Using the keyboard’s command X and command V, they could cut and paste anything. But what the computer offered in the way of power and universality was obtained at the expense of touch.

These were artists, after all, and even the filmmakers and webmasters started out scribbling on paper. Many of them complained about the lack of immediacy and tactility in digital media, and in 2002 I designed a course to show my students some electronic alternatives to the computer — ways to bridge the gap between the sound world of a generation raised in an electronic culture and the gestural tradition of the hand.

My class handouts grew into a crude PDF textbook, which somehow escaped the walls of the school. Emails began to arrive asking me to conduct workshops. An editor at Routledge, invited me to elevate my drawings and prose to a publishable state..” (Nic Collins)

Paperback, published in 2020, 452 pages.