Mitch Altman
area: Sound Art, Digital Art, Performance
Key Facts
nationality
USAarea
Sound Art, Digital Art, Performanceresidence
Berlinrecommending institution
paraflowstime period
August 2021 - August 2021Mitch Altman is an international hacker and inventor, best known for inventing TV-B-Gone remote controls, a keychain that turns off TVs in public places. He has been creating music and music synthesizers since he was a teenager. He was also co-founder of 3ware, a successful Silicon Valley startup in the late 1990s, and did pioneering work in Virtual Reality in the mid-1980s. He has contributed to MAKE and other magazines, and wrote a chapter for “Maker Pro”, a book about making a living from projects one loves. For the last several years Mitch has been giving performances, talks, leading workshops around the world, sharing how to make cool things with electronics, and teaching everyone to solder. He promotes hackerspaces and open source hardware, and mentors others wherever he goes. He is a co-founder of Noisebridge hackerspace in San Francisco, and is President and CEO of Cornfield Electronics.
ArduTouch is a music synthesizer kit for total beginners to learn: how to solder, how basic electronics works, how to program your own music synthesizer, the basics of how to make sound with computer chips.
ArduTouch, in its current form, is a very low cost project (currently $30 in parts), yet makes really beautiful music, sound, and noise! It has a built-in touch keyboard, as well as a speaker/amplifier, so after putting the kit together, you can immediately play it. The project is good for kids, musicians, students -- anyone wanting to make music, sound, or noise.
ArduTouch is re-programmable with the free and open source Arduino software.
(The project is called ArduTouch because anyone can program it with the Arduino software and play it with the touch keyboard.)
ArduTouch is totally open source, with all of the documentation for making one's own on the project's Github page:
https://github.com/maltman23/ArduTouch
The documentation comes with a tutorial for anyone to learn how to program their own synthesizers to create a very diverse range of music, sound, and noise.
ArduTouch is also available as a kit, with everything required, from Mitch Altman's website:
https://cornfieldelectronics.com/cfe/projects.php#ardutouch
100% of the proceeds go towards giving free workshops.
Mitch Altman has been working on this open source project for 5 years, and is continually improving it. Through this time period, over 1,000 people have made their own ArduTouch music synthesizer at free workshops that Mitch has lead for people of all ages.
Mitch has performed live music and soundscapes using ArduTouch boards.