Bricoleurs, black boxes and DIY music electronics

This article creates a close and detailed alignment between constructionist accounts of learning from within technology studies, and the activities of DIY music electronics practitioners. Drawing on Turkle and Papert (1990), the approach to learning described as the bricoleur is detailed as a concrete learning style, working in proximity to objects and attuned to object behaviours. The detailed profile of the bricoleur’s approach, and a nuanced exploration of the relationship between DIY music electronics practice and the opaque technological object identified as the black box, both form contributions to the wider literature on DIY practices within music and technology. Themes of technological affordance and constraint and the implications for accommodation and assimilation in learning are explored. The activities, culture, materials and communities of DIY music electronics are described, and a brief interdisciplinary history and theoretical overview of what can be understood by the black box of technology is provided.