Computers vs. handmade equipment

Question

After building performance patches with MAX/MSP for a fair while I picked up Nicolas Collins fantastic book "Handmade Electronic Music" and was surprised how fun, liberating and simple it was to build simple little CMOS oscillators and get really interesting results. I've really got to the point where I don't want to be looking at a screen when making sounds and love that with this stuff there's always a conversation going on between your hands and your ears. Consequently I'm trying to move completely away from the computer (a challenge as I use field recordings prominently - my best solution so far is sound files triggered from an SD card slot in an Arduino).

I was wondering if anyone else is moving in this way or has found a really comfortable way to marry the two approaches to making sounds?

Cheers

James

Answer 1

I sort of felt the same thing. I had spend so much time on the computer, and the physicality was lost. That's when I got a bit into physical computing, a little of circuit bending and lots of field recording. I still love doing software stuff, so I won't give that up quite yet :-)

The way I have combined this is by building physical devices as an interface for stuff I programme in Max/MSP... I use motion tracking, sensors, buttons, etc. To me, it doesn't have to be one or the other, but rather a pick of the best of both worlds.