Modification or Reinterpretation of the Function of Electronic Apparatuses (a.k.a. Hacking)
This tendency — which is also often an æsthetic statement — has been an important one since as early as 1929, with Walter Ruttman’s Weekend. A film without image, it could be considered the first attempt to create a montage using different sound sources.

The birth of musique concrète in 1948 can also be associated with this tendency, because Pierre Schaeffer’s realization that a recorded sound could have another “meaning” than that which was initially intended is the result of him hearing a “defective groove” on a disc he was playing “looping” repeatedly. This subsequently led him to make his first experiments in “musique concrète”. In the same manner, performance arts such as engraving or drawing done in real-time on film stock by artists such as Pierre Hébert have as historical models the experiments and work of people like Norman McLaren, who scratched sound and image directly on unused film stock.

Other artists, such as John Cage, Hindemith, etc. used technologies as instruments in and of themselves. The record player was in fact often considered as a “musical instrument” in contemporary commentaries (notably by André Coeuroy). Such ideas may not have generated widespread interest at the time, but the turntable and vinyl LP would experience a phenomenal resurgence of interest at exactly the moment when they were about to disappear forever. Around 1986 rap artists and DJs began to use vinyl LPs to create new sounds that they were not originally intended to produce (scratching, zapping, mix, etc.).

In the mid-1950s, some poets — Henri Chopin and Bernard Heidsieck most importantly — began to make use of the tape recorder as a means to extend the expressive possibilities of poetry. In the spirit of the Lettrists (Isidore Isou, Maurice Lemaître, François Dufrène), who had begun to consider the individual components of the word — the letters — as potentially meaningful elements in themselves and used them in order to “surpass them and fashion them into coherent works” [Translation] (Isou, cited in Wikipédia), the sound poets began to explore the possibilities this machine offered in terms of analysis and manipulation of sound. The tape recorder (now available commercially) was used to “view” sound microscopically and multiply sounds in the creation of sound poetry works. This was an expressive form that, while not necessarily denying in a systematic manner language and its “meaning”, was more interested in the constituent sounds of the discourse than in the discourse as a meaningful object. Works were created using breath sounds, phonemes, noise by-products of speech articulation and microphone techniques and manipulations afforded by the tape recorder (overdubbing, layering, loops, etc.).

In a way, the tape recorder was a direct extension of the act of writing to many of them. Authors such as Bernard Hiedseick (France) or Pierre-André Arcand (Canada) had an approach which magnified the writing, meaning and sound of the words using electronic means. Other more radical artist (Henri Chopin, for example) used the same instruments to augment the sonic potential of the words. Still others would use the microphone as a device to simply amplify the multiplicity of meanings of the words by textual encounters made possible via simple mixes. For example, The Four Horsemen (Toronto) in the 1970s created sound poetry that tended to explore the word and its meaning rather than the disintegration of its meaning using electronic tools.

In general, the modification of a piece of equipment’s function can be considered to be an integral part of the creative process of the artist.