Handmade Electronic Music: The Art of Hardware Hacking  by Nicolas Collins provides a long-needed, practical, and engaging introduction to the craft of making – as well as creatively cannibalizing – electronic circuits for artistic purposes. With a sense of adventure and no prior knowledge, the reader can subvert the intentions designed into devices such as radios and toys to discover a new sonic world. At a time when computers dominate music production, this book offers a rare glimpse into the core technology of early live electronic music, as well as more recent developments at the hands of emerging artists. In addition to advice on hacking found electronics, the reader learns how to make contact microphones, pickups for electromagnetic fields, oscillators, distortion boxes, and unusual signal processors cheaply and quickly.

This revised and expanded second edition is extensively illustrated and includes a DVD featuring eighty-seven video clips and twenty audio tracks by over one hundred hackers, benders, musicians, artists, and inventors from around the world, as well as thirteen video tutorials demonstrating projects in the book. Further enhancements include additional projects, photographs, diagrams, and illustrations.

download a previous version of the book here 0r buy the newest shiniest version with DVD from Nic’s site.

Recently TECHNE presented a workshop for teachers and volunteers at the 2015 GRCA Conference in Philadelphia. As part of the workshop we’ve put together this list of resources, books, theoretical work, and websites related to DIY instrument building, technology and music, general electronics and technology guides, TECHNE’s heroines, role-models and organizations we admire, and more.

Handmade Electronic Music by Nic Collins
This book describes in simple, easy to understand writing a variety of different electronic music experiments, hacks, and instruments you can build at home. It also includes examples of how different musicians and artists have used handmade electronics in their music and installations. Amazing book for all artists from beginner to advanced!

Circuit Bending: Build Your Own Alien Instrument by Reed Ghazhala
Reed Ghazhala is a multimedia artists who has published a number of books, essays, and designed several circuit bent instruments. His book gives you an expert overview of how to design, build, and create music with circuit bent instruments.

Make Magazine
Maker Faire
Make Magazine published quarterly is an amazing collection of DIY projects,  new technologies, and features about hackers, media artists and more. In addition, their website publishes articles and projects for free. The MakerFaires are multiday events held nationally where technology, invention, creativity and the Maker movement come together to share ideas.

Girls Who Code
Launched in Spring 2012, Girls Who Code is a national nonprofit organization working to close the gender gap in the technology and engineering sectors. With support from public and private partners, Girls Who Code works to educate, inspire, and equip high school girls with the skills and resources to pursue opportunities in computing fields.

Women’s Audio Mission
Women’s Audio Mission is a San Francisco based, non-profit organization dedicated to the advancement of women in music production and the recording arts. In a field where women are chronically under-represented (less than 5%), WAM seeks to “change the face of sound” by providing hands-on training, experience, career counseling and job placement to women and girls in media technology for music, radio, film, television and the internet. WAM believes that women’s mastery of music technology and inclusion in the production process will expand the vision and voice of media and popular culture.

littleBits founded by Ayah Bdeir 
littleBits is a company that has developed modular electronic kits that provide easy and fun ways to learn electronics, There are hundreds of modules that allow you to prototype and invent anything!

Adafruit founded by Limor Fried
Adafruit was founded in 2005 by MIT engineer, Limor “Ladyada” Fried. Her goal was to create the best place online for learning electronics and making the best designed products for makers of all ages and skill levels. Her company sells a full range of electronic parts and kits and features tons of video demos, DIY projects, and more.

Women in Electronic Music 
The ever-growing Wikipedia list of women in electronic music.

Female Pressure
female pressure is an international network of female artists in the fields of electronic music and digital arts: from musicians, composers and DJs to visual artists, cultural workers and researchers. A worldwide resource of female talent that can be searched after criteria like location, profession, style or name. “Why are there so few women active in the electronic music scene?” – each one of us has heard this question a thousand times… Here is the answer: It’s not our number, it’s about how and if we are recognized!

Western Music and Its Others: Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music by Georgina Born (Editor), David Hesmondhalgh (Editor)
This innovative collection of articles offers a major comprehensive overview of new developments in cultural theory as applied to Western music. Addressing a broad range of primarily twentieth-century music, the authors examine two related phenomena: musical borrowings or appropriations, and how music has been used to construct, evoke, or represent difference of a musical or a sociocultural kind.

Undoing Gender by Judith Butler
Undoing Gender constitutes Judith Butler’s recent reflections on gender and sexuality, focusing on new kinship, psychoanalysis and the incest taboo, transgender, intersex, diagnostic categories, social violence, and the tasks of social transformation. In terms that draw from feminist and queer theory, Butler considers the norms that govern–and fail to govern–gender and sexuality as they relate to the constraints on recognizable personhood. The book constitutes a reconsideration of her earlier view on gender performativity from Gender Trouble. In this work, the critique of gender norms is clearly situated within the framework of human persistence and survival. And to “do” one’s gender in certain ways sometimes implies “undoing” dominant notions of personhood. She writes about the “New Gender Politics” that has emerged in recent years, a combination of movements concerned with transgender, transsexuality, intersex, and their complex relations to feminist and queer theory.

Improvisation as Art: Conceptual Challenges, Historical Perspectives by Edgar Landgraff
Improvisation as Art traces how modernity’s emphasis on inventiveness has changed the meaning of improvisation; and how the ideals and laws that led improvisation to be banned from “high art” in the eighteenth century simultaneously enabled the inventive reintegration of improvisation into modernism.

For all you girl hackers out there, Adafruit is the place for you! From kits to Arduinos to power supplies and circuits – this place has it all and offers classes, tutorials and a lot of other great tools to learn more about electronic building.

Adafruit was founded in 2005 by MIT engineer, Limor “Ladyada” Fried. Her goal was to create the best place online for learning electronics and making the best designed products for makers of all ages and skill levels. Ladayada was recently featured on the cover of Wired  magazine!

Browse their online store and more here:  http://www.adafruit.com/

Check out a video about Adafruit founder Limor Fried.