1st Edition
Modular Synthesis Patching Machines and People
Modular Synthesis: Patching Machines and People brings together scholars, artists, composers, and musical instrument designers in an exploration of modular synthesis, an unusually multifaceted musical instrument that opens up many avenues for exploration and insight, particularly with respect to technological use, practice, and resistance.
Through historical, technical, social, aesthetic, and other perspectives, this volume offers a collective reflection on the powerful connections between technology, creativity, culture, and personal agency. Ultimately, this collection is about creativity in a technoscientific world and speaks to issues fundamental to our everyday lives and experiences, by providing insights into the complex relationships between content creators, the technologies they use, and the individuals and communities who design and engage with them.
With chapters covering VCV Rack, modular synthesis, instrument design, and the histories of synthesizer technology, as well as interviews with Dave Rossum, Corry Banks, Meng Qi, and Dani Dobkin, among others, Modular Synthesis is recommended reading for advanced undergraduates, researchers, and practitioners of electronic music and music technology.
Chapter 3 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
Introduction - Andreas Kitzmann and Einar Engström
Preface (All Patched Up: A Material and Discursive History of Modularity and Control Voltages) - Ezra J. Teboul
1. The Buchla Music Easel: From Cyberculture to Market Culture
Theodore Gordon
2. Modular Synthesizers as Conceptual Models
Jonathan De Souza
3. A Time-Warped Assemblage as a Musical Instrument: Flexibility and Constauration of Modular Synthesis in Willem Twee Studio 1
Hannah Bosma
4. Interview
Dani Dobkin
5. Gordon Mumma’s Sound-Modifier Console
Michael Johnsen
6. Artist Statement: Switchboard Modulars – Vacant Levels and Intercept Tones
Lori Napoleon
7. Eurorack to VCV Rack: Modular Synthesis as Compositional Performance
Justin Randell and Hillegonda C. Rietveld
8. Strange Play: Parametric Design and Modular Learning
Kurt Thumlert, Jason Nolan, Melanie McBride, and Heidi Chan
9. Grid Culture
Arseni Troitski and Eliot Bates
10. Modular Ecologies
Bana Haffar
11. Ourorack: Altered States of Consciousness and Auto-Experimentation with Electronic Sound
William J. Turkel
12. Patching Possibilities: Resisting Normative Logics in Modular Interfaces
Asha Tamirisa
13. Draft/Patch/Weave: Interfacing the Modular Synthesizer with the Floor Loom
Jacob Weinberg and Anna Bockrath
14. Composing Autonomy in Thresholds and Fragile States
David Dunn and David Kant
15. Virtual Materiality: Simulated Mediation in the Eurorack Synthesizer Format
Ryan Page
16. Interview: Designing Instruments as Designing Problems
Meng Qi
17. Interviews with Four Toronto-based Modular Designers
Heidi Chan
18. Interview
Dave Rossum
19. Interview
Paulo Santos
20. Interview
Corry Banks
21. Modular Synthesis in the Era of Control Societies
Sparkles Stanford
22. Randomness, Chaos, and Communication
Naomi Mitchell
23. Interview
Andrew Fitch
24. From "What If?" to "What Diff?" And Back Again
Michael Palumbo and Graham Wakefield
25. Interview: The Mycelia of Does-Nothing Objects
Brian Crabtree
Biography
Ezra J. Teboul is a researcher and artist, and currently a student librarian at Concordia University. They obtained a PhD in Electronic Arts from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2020. In 2022, they were a scholar-in-residence at the Columbia University Computer Music Center. Their work focuses on the material histories of electricity, work, and music.
Andreas Kitzmann is an associate professor of Humanities at York University in Toronto, Canada. His research interests include modular synthesis, technology and culture, digital media and community, and memory studies. His self-authored books include The Hypertext Handbook: The Straight Story and Saved from Oblivion: Documenting the Daily from Diaries to Web Cams. He has co-edited two books, and his work has also been included in various edited collections and journals such as A History of English Autobiography (2016), From Text to Txting: New Media in the Classroom (2012), the International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies (2017), First Monday (2015), and Organized Sound (2023).
Einar Engström is a software engineer, modular synthesist, and computer musician. Creatively, he has been known to code in Lua, SuperCollider, Tidal Cycles, and the Teletype esolang, whilst professionally he primarily inhabits the BEAM ecosystem. Both practices are natural extensions to Einar’s previous PhD research into the history and philosophy of computing music programming, which focused on the Acoustical and Behavioral Research Center at Bell Laboratories—the first behemoth of innovation in both telecommunications and computing. He also holds an MA in Visual Culture from Waseda University (Tokyo, Japan), is a former editor-in-chief of the bilingual international contemporary art magazine LEAP (Beijing, China) and technician and researcher at RE/Lab (Toronto Metropolitan University), and has hands in various electronic music record labels.
"Just when everyone thought digital had evolved into music’s alpha species, modular analog synthesizers resurged after decades of dormancy. Modular Synthesis provides a valuable overview of how and why the technology that redefined the musical instrument in the 1960s became relevant and transformative again."
Nicolas Collins, composer and author of Handmade Electronic Music — The Art of Hardware Hacking
"It’s no accident that the first academic collection on modular synthesizers touches on so many disciplines. Across its pages you will hear from musicians, artists, makers, and scholars from across the arts and human sciences. How many books on music discuss looms, switchboards, and electric fish? How many books on philosophy examine the material metaphors on which philosophers’ ideas are based? How many books on electronics include studies of education or the gendered politics of naming? Modular Synthesis is as varied, multidisciplinary, and enchanting as its object of study."
Jonathan Sterne, author of Diminished Faculties, MP3, and The Audible Past
