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ELECTRONICOS FANTASTICOS! is a project where retired consumer electronics are resuscitated as instruments, new ways to play music are invented, and all kinds of people are invited to be orchestrated with the artist and musician Ei Wada. Once we dismantle old consumer electronics, we realize the condensed wisdom of pioneers and the interesting and mysterious scientific/physics phenomenon hidden inside these objects. By transferring these into electronic musical instruments, a sound like a groan of electronics begins to echo. Old consumer electronics come to life as yokai-supernatural creatures from Japanese folklore, sometimes they appear as spirits of abandoned tools.

Circuit-bending is an electronic art which implements creative audio short-circuiting. This renegade path of electrons represents a catalytic force capable of exploding new experimental musical forms forward at a velocity previously unknown. Anyone at all can do it; no prior knowledge of electronics is needed. The technique is, without a doubt, the easiest electronic audio design process in existence.

"Electronic music has been around for about a century, and women (however ignored) have been a part of the movement from the beginning. Sisters With Transistors - a film with an excellent title - tells the story of electronic music's female pioneers, starting with the Lithuanian Clara Rockmore, who performed solo in the 1920s at the New York Philharmonic with a theremin, one of the very first electronic instruments. "

"The music on Quartz Locked, Deep City Wandering, was sourced from non-musical, professional electronic appliances recorded back in 1987 and preserved on a C-90 cassette until this day. The original sounds were mainly derived from two electronic devices: a hacked, roadside traffic signal data logger, on the one hand, and a physician's pager, on the other. Wires were soldered to various parts of the data logger's motherboard and connected to a tape recorder's audio inputs, emitting a rich assortment of glitch sounds, static noises and buzzing a-plenty. A physician's pager, smuggled from the local hospital, was similarly hacked and manipulated in order to produce high frequency buzzing noises with striking modulation/demodulation effects. Both devices were eventually plugged together to create additional random interference patterns, while occasional tape manipulation and varispeed effect were also applied during the recording process."

Electronic Musical Resources: Articles

"Visualizing Sound - Representations of Sound in Contemporary Creation stems directly from the LEV (Laboratorio de electrónica visual - Visual Electronics Lab) Festival. Launched at LABoral in 2007, the festival focuses on the convergence of electronic sound creation and visual arts. Visualizar el sonido [Visualizing Sound] brings the same line of enquiry into the white walls of the art center. The result is an exhibition where sound and image perfectly balance each other. Some works give a graphic, architectural and physical presence to sound, others reveal the sound produced by physical objects we'd otherwise regard as perfectly mute."

"ELECTROCHROMA is a 58ʼ30" audiovisual work that emerged from the manipulation of light to generate imagery as well as using a combination of extended techniques applied to sonic-material sources, including translation of image to sound to create the 5.1 surround audio composition. The work utilizes various analog and digital procedures and a variety of software processes to manipulate the moving image and sound. The workʼs imagery ranges from dark to light monochromatic spheres, shifting dynamics and intensity, including flickering and pulsating patterns, retinal impact, and sensory overloads. The sound composition focuses on timbre, low ends, modulated frequencies, textures, static noises, and electronic sounds moving through space. Other sonic layers were created through the use of electromagnetism, custom electronic sounds, and voices scored for the work and performed in a recording studio by artist Marylea Martha Quintana."

"Scientists from Chalmers have demonstrated a new kind of detector for sound at the level of quietness of quantum mechanics. The result offers prospects of a new class of quantum hybrid circuits that mix acoustic elements with electrical ones, and may help illuminate new phenomena of quantum physics. The results have been published in Nature Physics. ​The "quantum microphone" is based on a single electron transistor, that is, a transistor where the current passes one electron at a time. The acoustic waves studied by the research team propagate over the surface of a crystalline microchip, and resemble the ripples formed on a pond when a pebble is thrown into it. The wavelength of the sound is a mere 3 micrometers, but the detector is even smaller, and capable of rapidly sensing the acoustic waves as they pass by."

"Sampling is a production tool that is fundamental to electronic music. A seemingly simple act - taking small bits of prerecorded sound, often from an existing composition, and incorporating them into a new piece of music - has in the past few decades proven to be a revolutionary cultural force. An essential element for the development of hip-hop in the 1980s, as well as for electronic music scenes concurrently taking shape around the world, sampling helped lower the barrier of entry for potential music makers: No longer did a producer need studio access or a group of musicians to make full and rich productions. Instead, they could dig for loops and breaks from a wealth of existing material and use the pieces they found to create new compositions. The process also allowed the artists to insert themselves into a different type of musical timeline, traversing and connecting decades of sounds in a way that would have been impossible before the dawn of sampling."

"The "Sonògraf" is an electronic audiovisual instrument. Thought as a music learning tool for primary schools, it allows the drawing to be transformed into music, turning gestural strokes and geometric figures into electronic sounds. A set of buttons and potentiometers allow live manipulation of the "sonification" characteristics of the drawing, making it possible to speed up, slow down or pause the resulting music, as well as decide its scales and tonalities."

"Eirik Brandal is and artist and engineer working between circuits and sound, primarily on the development of intricate sonic sculptures in which the electronic components play an important aesthetic role, also integrating light in some of them, resulting in amazing experiences around objects and space, inspired by the sculptural work of people such as Walter Giers, Alain le Boucher, Peter Vogel, Leonardo Ulian and Gislain Benoit. "

"The inner sounds of objects and substances picked up with contact mics or hydrophones never cease to amaze. For Inner Out, Italian sound designer and artist Nicola Giannini uses contact mics frozen in ice, and performs a concert on them by playing the ice. Using different objects and techniques, such as grinding, tapping, hitting the ice, or pouring hot water, he creates the source material which he processes with live electronics to create a surround concert."

"The Weather Warlock tells weather for people who can't see. Musician and electronic instrument inventor Quintron built a device that converts atmospheric conditions into sound, which he uses in his daily broadcast, "Weather for the Blind.""

"I am hard of hearing as well as an electronic music enthusiast. I have always been an observer and I have always seen that my companions' reactions to the music we listen to together are different from mine. I tried with all my might to feel what they felt - with poor results. Which made me sad and irritated. Would I never be able to fully appreciate the aesthetics of sound? Eventually, I began to look more deeply into my experiences."

guitars, motors "Video documentation of the sound installation "minigit" by Trobollowitsch Andreas @ Werkstatt XV (Vienna) December 2011 Spatial Sound Installation for four acoustic guitars on the wall. Four converted ventilators which use cello-bow hair instead of propellers set the strings into oscillation. Soundscapes arise through the soft, smooth picking of the guitar strings by the circling cellobow hair, the permanently modifying overtone layers are reminiscent of an electronically generated sound aesthetic. www.klangmanifeste.at "

Page by Peter Elsea (UCLA ELECTRONIC MUSIC STUDIOS) "The notion of sound is rather remarkable. Something happens there and we know it here, even if we are looking the other way, not paying attention, or even asleep. The fact that some sounds can produce physical and emotional effects is just short of astounding. These notes will perhaps remove some of the mystery associated with sound and hearing, but probably none of the wonder. "

"UK artist Ryan Jordan led a workshop earlier this summer in Montréal, building musical instruments out of geological circuit boards, an experiment in terrestrial instrumentation he calls "Derelict Electronics.""

This project explores how innovative art projects on public urban screens can combine with electronic social network systems on smaller screens to initiate an international dialogue on the problem of adaptation to climate change. The main theme of this trans-disciplinary research is on the environmental and cultural significance of water in three cities in the Asia- Pacific region: Melbourne, Shanghai and Tokyo

"Your source for high-quality contact mics, suction cup mics, electronic stethoscopes, hydrophones, and other unusual microphones"

Product Design and Electronic Music. Some very fun and far out ideas here. A jelly fish theremin!