The Bent festival, which begins tonight in New York City, is a celebration of DIY musical instruments. Artists from all over converge to beep, blip, and strum for your pleasure. With a heavy emphasis on hacking your own instruments, this is definitely something we’re interested in. If you’ve only heard a little bit of circuit bending and didn’t like it, you may want to give it a try anyway. The musical genres are extremely diverse, it’s not all just random noise.
[David Crammer] must really like nightmares. The hurdy gurdy is a stringed musical instrument, dating as far back as the eleventh century A.D., where the strings are sounded via a rosined wheel that is turned with a crank. [Crammer] took this unique instrument, applied his circuit-bending and Furby-scalping skills to generate a Furby Gurdy that sound like Kraftwerk on acid.
The ThingamaKIT is an anthropomorphic analog synthesizer kit from Bleep Labs. Using “LEDacles”, photoresistors, knobs, and switches, it generates interesting high pitched vocalizations. Bleep Labs sent us a review unit and this article shares our experiences building and using the kit. We’ve also included a tutorial on making some hacks, modifications, and circuit bends to it. Skip to the end to see a video of our hacked kit in action.
GetLoFi has always been one of our first stops when looking for circuit bending fun. Their latest project is building this simple dub siren from a noise making key chain. Dub sirens or rasta boxes are a signature sound in dub reggae. The base of this project is an eight sound keychain. Each pad is wired to an eight position selector switch. The pitch resistor is replaced with a linear pot. One push button is used to replace the original eight and another is used for mute. Plug the 1/4inch jack into a delay pedal and you’re ready to rock. Check out the video below to see this particular box in use.
We can’t remember the last time a new cart or peripheral for the NES was released, but [Tony Amendolare] at ElektroKraft has just changed that. In conjunction with Nesdev.com, [Amendolare] created Super Synth Drums, a NES-compatible cartridge that turns button presses on the NES gamepad into drum sounds synthesized by the NES’s sound chips. To complement his software, he created the Sonic DrumAxe, a controller that looks a bit like a potato gun and is played like a guitar.
We coaxed our friends at Mahalo Daily into coming along with us to LA SIGGRAPH’s Maker Night. There were a handful of interesting projects there. [Univac] was showing a circuit bent Teletubby and his CellularRecombomat. [Brett Doar] brought his Bronco Table. Tired of engineers building items that made life easier, he decided to make something that made life more difficult. The table uses a piezo to detect the sound of something being set on top. It then starts twitching and bucking to shake the item free. The motors look like they’re salvaged window motors. Finally, we talked to [Mark Frauenfelder] from BoingBoing/Make about how he got into the DIY culture.
[Pete Edwards] and [Fred Owsley] openly admitted that the title was the most thinly veiled audience-bait ever constructed. Nevertheless, they poured through a great talk covering the basics of circuit bending and some of the pieces they had built over the years. Fred said that what attracts him to circuit bending is the hands on approach to something very scientific i.e. he can figure out how to construct an interesting circuit by rubbing his finger along the back of the board. As far as where to start: always a battery powered device and use the toy store as a last resort. You’re going to tear the thing apart so why pay for it? Dumpster diving, garage sales, swap meets, and flea markets are all places to look. Parts don’t need to be anything better than grab bag either. They suggested an easy first step is dropping the operating voltage of your device and seeing how it reacts. Pete and Fred had several examples of devices they’ve modified: Speak & Spells, Casio SA keyboards, Barbi karaoke machines, and the voice changing gas mask pictured above.
The Bent Festival for circuit bending is coming up soon if you’d like to see more. You can also check out these links for more information on circuit bending.
The first talk we went to at Notacon was [Sam Harmon]’s great introduction to circuit bending, the process of modifying sound generating electronics to create new musical instruments. Reed Ghazala is considered the father of circuit bending for his pioneering work starting in 1966. Sam pointed out that a “prepared piano” could be considered the non-electric precursor to circuit bending. It involves the musician placing different types of material on the piano’s components. Sam presented many different examples of where to start with circuit bending: the Casio PT-10, PAiA Theremax, Atari Punk Console. He also mentioned a couple AVR projects: AVRSYN and todbot’s Arduino work.
The session ended with [Thom Robertson] showing off the Weird Sound Generator he built and his GHX software for playing real music with a Guitar Hero controller.
Apparently our Russian brethren have some issues ordering things online. Their shipping solution? A bit of remote social engineering. Thanks to the nature of Russian addresses – that is, the language is pretty easy to recognize – they’ve found that putting down their address in Russia along with a Canadian zip code will usually result in the package being forwarded along thanks to the thoughtful Canadian postal workers. Thanks [Jock]
Social engineering not your thing? OK, well here’s a few extra hacks to chew on. [Sam] thinks you should wrap your electronics in a condom to keep em dry. If you’re in NY, you might want to check out the circuit bending festival. Oh, and if you’ve had your head in the sand, you might have missed the steam powered R2D2.
