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Consumer Electronics Make Music
metoikos writes "Forget about hacking your Gameboy -- what about cat toys or Teddy Ruxpins? Any of these is fair game to a circuit bending hobbyist. Essentially, circuit bending is the art of making interesting noises come out of re-engineered consumer electronics, mostly toys.
Bending recently came into the spotlight when a number of news organizations discovered the 2004 Bent Festival at New York's Tank.
Derek Sajbel, a bender from California, is writing a book/doing a documentary on it." BishopBerkeley writes "Circuit bending has apparently been going on long enough among a large enough contingent of benders to merit a weeklong festival dedicated to bending circuits. The art is largely a process of making musical instruments by 'bending' the circuits of fairly common electronic instruments and gadgets. According to this article in the New York Times people have been making rather interesting music by modifying the strange toys with which a lot of us grew up. If you're near Manhattan, and you didn't know about the Bent Festival, then think about going. You can find more info at the official circuit bending web site."
Bender Festival? Think of all the oil, cigars, and robot pr0n there would be...
I am defenseless. Use your button. Mod me down with all of your hatred.
Can you actually call that music? I wonder what it sounds like.
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So If I just go ahead and bend this keyboard something interest should come out...
K DS FHAKEJHROQWEOURQWLKJEF:LKJ#!LKJ#@$!
waits 10 seconds...
ASDLJGFLKJ#$()!*U@#$!)ADFKOH#@$I!HJ@#KJRQWEKJFA
I should probably take my Playstation 2 into one of those geeky bending festivals -- maybe they could get that darned DVD tray to open and shut faster!
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of bended toys trasmitting datagrams using interesting music... oh well.
Where is that guy who'd die defending what I had to say when I need him?
I guess it requires a certain kind of bent of one's mind..to bend the circuits
Electronic toys have also been known to melt (well, 'bend') when the batteries start running low.
-- If you can read this, you are too close to my signature.
I'm sorry but I'm not sure you can call that anything but controlled noise, albeit poorly controlled. It's pretty bad.
If that's all it takes to be called music, then I'm going to record all the noises my car makes and sell a CD of it.
That is worse than techno. I mean, it sounds like someone took a cat and pluged said cat into the wall. That isn't music, it is noise.
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
I remember reading a story about how an HP engineer set up a row of printers (I think it was 12, in total) and he programmed the servos to sing "Happy Birthday" for a fellow engineer... I wish I could remember more details but I'm in no state to look up details right now.
Slashdot is proof that Sturgeon's Law applies to mankind.
Although not quite the same thing, some people are making neat music from plain hardware. See this site for some interesting output from a DSP processor. Audio synthesis is a great hobby - the signal processing and mathematics involved are fascinating.
As the Barbie Liberation Army
Bah. If you want to know circuit bending, check it out from the real masters...
I've been torturing electronics for years, and have some personal instruments that make sounds no commercial synthesizer could ever do.
was that Big Mouth Billy Bass someone modded a long time ago to say "Pork!
My Webcomic: Asylum on 5th Street
For those of you who don't remember that device (and I have only vague recollections of seeing it on TV myself), the Teddy Ruxpin was a stuffed bear which moved its mouth in sync (more or less), to the words of any cassete placed in the device. When packaged with a book & tape, it would, in effect, read the book to the child.
Now I imagine that by now you're wondering what on earth this could possibly have to do with copyright law, right? Allow me to quote from this: And we had best get used to unusual decisions like this. Unless you live to be over 70 (and barring a change in the law), absolutely nothing copyrighted during your lifetime will ever pass into the public domain.
Of course, if you're a US voter, and you would like to help end some of the copyright inanity (the DMCA, the NET Act, etc.), feel free to petition your representatives. You can call them for free via this 1-800 number (they will help transfer you to the proper representative): 1 (800) 839-5276
ASDLJGFLKJ#$()!*U@#$!)ADFKOH#@$I!HJ@#KJRQWEKJFAKDS FHAKEJHROQWEOURQWLKJEF:LKJ#!LKJ#@$!
Try listening to Einstuerzende Neubauten. I'm sure that they've used something that sounds like that in at least one of their songs.
And that way you can save yourself another keyboard.
I hate Liberals and Conservatives.
If you are a Liberal or a Conservative, then HAVE A NICE DAY!
Courage.
Apparently from reading comments on this board so far, most people seem to be offended by experimental music. "You call that music? That's just noise!". Believe it or not, Noise actually is a genre of music and has a rather large following. I don't care if you don't like it, but I could just as easily criticize whatever MTV or Classical Rock things you are all listening to.
Remember, people used to say the same thing about Rock N' Roll, which in my opinion is a completely stale genre. Try and open your minds a bit to things you don't understand.
I've had some fun with cellphones recently. Have your cell phone in one hand, and use the other to have a friend's cell phone yours (may as well use his minutes, right?).
/.-ing), and used my cellphone and answering machine to create some cool noises at the end.
When the call is established, put the cellphones in... er... a 69 position I guess. Microphone to speaker. You should get some pretty cool feedback this way, and you can 'control' it (sort of) by moving the phones around.
I recently covered the Pixies song "Alec Eiffel" for an online Pixies tribute album (link omitted... don't need the
grib.
maybe
If you think that's cool, look for a copy of the CD "Symphony for Dot Matrix Printers" by [The User], as previously discussed on Slashdot. It's excellent.
Not quite as good, but still worth buying, is "Xerophonics"
Of course, circuit bending is how popular electronic music started. Kraftwerk were building their own instruments from scavenged parts in 1970.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
If that's all it takes to be called music, then I'm going to record all the noises my car makes and sell a CD of it.
Actually, there is an entire genre of modern-classical music, Pioneered by Pierre Schaeffer where the music is made primarily, or exclusively from found sound. It celebrated it's 50th anniversary a couple years ago or something.
A show on a local radio show does Musique Concrete once a month. One of my favorite shows was musick made entirely from train sounds. It's funny that I thought of that from a slashdot article posted earlier today.
Usually the sounds are manipulated in one way or another.
The music that this article talks about is not Musique Concrete, but it is experimental music that would probably be appreciated by the same people.
I hate Liberals and Conservatives.
If you are a Liberal or a Conservative, then HAVE A NICE DAY!
Courage.
Led Zeppelin used it to great effect. Here is the Beach Boys using it in Good Vibrations
One would venture to call this a 'bender' device since it is functionally the same as a metal detector, and works by sensing the proximity of the player's hands to the antennae.
Any other similar devices or early bender apps?
I read all the comments to this point, and saw no mention of industrial.
It started at least 15 years ago (though some other versions may have started earlier)...in Germany.
They recorded (sampled) industrial noise, and mixed it together with vocals, percussion (indeed, some bands used the sampled noises AS vocals and percussion) to make music. Skinny Puppy is a great example.
Just thought I'd bring it up.
That is worse than techno. I mean, it sounds like someone took a cat and pluged said cat into the wall. That isn't music, it is noise.
I haven't checked out the sites yet, does that mean they have mp3s to download (look of excitement).
You probably wouldn't like the song Ethno Techno Squeako Skweeko by God is my Co-Pilot. It is a 3 minute song that sounds kinda like Techno, but with Clarinet and lots of squeaky toys.
Some people find it annoying but it is one of my favorite songs of theirs. Most of their music I would describe as noisey punk rock.
I hate Liberals and Conservatives.
If you are a Liberal or a Conservative, then HAVE A NICE DAY!
Courage.
Okay, so most music has a bit of repetition in it, so let's say the verse lasts 30 seconds out of that song. You still have 1.5 x 10^54 possible verses.
True, but different verses may still sound roughly the same. Though your melody has several dozen notes in it, a judge will often take only about eight of them when determining what melodies are "substantially similar" for copyright purposes. Now you're down to under six million melodies. Compare that to how many songs have been written (over 4.5 million in BMI's repertory alone), and you get the depressing result of the article "A Chilling Effect on Music".
Famous noise artist G.X Jupitter-Larsen, when performing with his band, The Haters (who celebrated their 25th Anniversary last month), used to hold a live microphone against an electric grinder.
At maximum amplification.
Until it stopped working.
As GX is fond of saying...
A xylowave occurs everytime an effect has no cause, or a cause has no effect.
Three Squirrels
Check this link outa kers.htm
http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/~hsakr/hdspeakers/hdspe
I saw this a while back, you gotta check out the movies clips.
"I have great faith in fools: Self confidence my friends call it." ~Edgar Allan Poe
Also, if you like instruments that you hold in your hand, here is a gallery of all sorts of really weird instruments.
I hate Liberals and Conservatives.
If you are a Liberal or a Conservative, then HAVE A NICE DAY!
Courage.
Needless to say, something as odd as circuit bending doesn't have an "official" web site. However, the person widely credited with starting and popularizing circuit bending is Reed Ghazala, and his site is http://www.anti-theory.com/. Got to give credit where credit is due, folks... More information on bending and other amazing experimental musical instruments is available at http://www.oddmusic.com.
Does this remind anyone of Aphex Twin? He created a couple of albums using analog toys and circuits, including the sounds of the programs recorded on cassette tapes for the ZX-Spectrum computer (people from Europe will know what I am talking about), that was my first computer by the way a whooping 3.5 Mhz with 48K or ram.
None of these non-standard uses are authorised by the patent holders. I'm notifying each and every one of the manufacturers about these blatant violations of the DMCA.
Happens I know a little Keyboardese...
KEYBOARD: "Arghh! It hurts! It hurts! Oh the pain!"
Were Teddy Ruxpins still around when Enter Sandman came out?
Reminds me of at a place where I worked they had a toy singing Christmas Tree. I can't stand Christmas Music for personal reasons, but to make a long story short I really wanted to put in a tape of Current 93, especially their gothic folk music stuff. (Not as much for the spooky noise. Falling Back in Fields of Rape might be appropriate.)
Never did it. Would probably get me fired. Example Lyrics. I particularly like Hourglass which has accoustic guitar, flute, chello, violin, and really intense vocals.
I hate Liberals and Conservatives.
If you are a Liberal or a Conservative, then HAVE A NICE DAY!
Courage.
Oh, the fun I used to have with a Casio VL-Tone twenty or so years ago. I was playing keyboards in a sort of psychedelic funk band (think XTC meets Parliament) and though my main keyboards were a Farfisa Mini-Compact, a Roland Juno 106, and an Ensoniq Mirage, a pair of VL-Tones were part of my gear.
Despite tone generators worthy of a Nokia cell phone, a rhythm box that made a 606 sound like John Bonham, and a four-banger calculator to boot, they sounded like God's Own Voice when run through a Roland Space Echo, an Electro Harmonix Memory Man, various fuzz boxes and guitar effect pedals, and an Ampeg bass amp driving an 18" speaker.
For purely visual effect, I'd have my roadies duct tape one to each of my forearms for that Casio Borg effect. We used the cheesy rhythm box sounds as a click track for one of our songs (our drummer was steady enough to keep in sync without a headphone feed).
Playing melodies on those tiny chicklet keys was a bitch, though, especially after a few backstage drinks.
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
I am getting tired of reading yesterday's nytimes stories on /. This article was released twenty-four hours ago on NY Times Online, and has been in print all day.
When I was in 4th grade or so, I had one of those "Little Professor" calculators from Texas Instruments which I decided to abuse with a sottering iron one day for shits and giggles. After messing around for a little bit, I found by reconnecting the transistors I could get it to make different sounds controlled by the keys. Suffice to say, it was very limited, but fun to play with for about a week.
Funny how this is suddenly a fad.
Formula One company Asiatech made one of their engines play The Saints Go Marching In".
Details here (at the bottom).
Don't you stupid mods even read the first sentence of the article? Oh, right, I must be new here :P
Forget about hacking your Gameboy -- what about cat toys or Teddy Ruxpins? Any of these is fair game to a circuit bending hobbyist.
Here were a bunch of MIT grads that did just this...and everyone loved them at the time. Sure they included guitars and other equipment but they always had the BENT deal....
Okay... since when is "destroy all humans" considered insightful? Funny, maybe, but insightful!?
Oh well. I guess that only the trolls are left here to moderate this late on a Friday night...
The others were just regular musicians.
Anyone still subscribed to Emusic.com can download Symphony #2 for Dot Matrix Printers as well as Xerophonics.
Also, a project everyone can download for free is Droplift which is created by multiple peole inspired by Negativland. (Of whom everyone should have downloaded their illegal U2 single by now. It's about a little dog named Snuggles.)
I hate Liberals and Conservatives.
If you are a Liberal or a Conservative, then HAVE A NICE DAY!
Courage.
It doesn't look like much now, but I can't wait to see where it goes. Imagine working at a toy store, and posititioning Tim the Talking Teddy squashed under a stack of boxes, begging, "Please help me... I don't want to die." I don't see any real meaningful non-entertainment purposes to it, but I sure as hell wish I could reprogram my little brother's talking dolls to say, "bitch, ima fuck yo' ass up!"
there's this "barbie radio" toy that I've been dying to hack... whenever I go down the barbie isle with my girlfriend, I usually press the buttons of the toys to all go off at once just to mess with her... and one day, I realized this barbie radio toy had really good chiptunes playing (if you can ignore the barbie voice going "hey, cool!" randomly... something I'd definitely like to remove). some of the songs sound like they were lifted straight out of a megaman game for the NES. it'd be pretty cool to do what these guys are doing with circuit bending... but... it would be even cooler if I could write my own tunes for the hardware. any ideas?
I can't tell what's going on here.
... or they're trying to defeat the RIAA by creating "music" that sounds just like the deliberately corrupted mp3's on KaZaA.
Either they're trying to prevent filesharing by making crap that nobody would ever bother to download...
To be music, I think that sequence of sounds needs to strike you as something more than just noise. I mean I suppose I could go into a technical definition of how tones relate to each other, the classical 12-note to an octave scale is NOT an arbitrary decision but relates to how sound waves work, but it's kind of lengthy for a ./ post. Basically, there is more to being music than just making noise. I mean I can play an executable as PCM or PWM data, that doesn't make the resulting noise music.
I think industrial music is an excellent example of the difference between moise and music. It started through the sampling of sound from industry (as in factores, foundries and such) and the use of that in music. This was applied with some impressive results, eg Skinny Puppy. However while that is music, you'd be hard pressed to walk in to an actual factory and listen to the random sounds in there and call THAT music.
Just because someone screws around and lays something to a track doesn't make it music. That doesn't mean that music can't be changed by experimentation, but just because you are experimenting with sound doesn't mean you are creating music.
A track made with windows(TM)sounds only.
With the great sound of some of these toys once bent, if you listen to just "normal" music, I'm sure there are some bent instruments slipped in. If you listen to any electronic music, the probability is almost 100% that you've been liking the sounds of these things already, possibly even as some of the main instruments in your favorite tracks.
Bands like Nine Inch Nails, Meat Beat Manifesto, and I'm sure many others use these things in their music. Some of the people I have been doing visuals for have been using bent instruments and I've been playing with them for a while now. You'd never know that toys were making some of the sounds. I would assume that everything was created somehow on the computer if I didn't know better from firsthand experience.
It is true that it is possible for some people to do some interesting things.
However, that isn't the case most of the time. Usually these people have little or no electronics knowledge. Instead, they do a lot of drugs and poke around the live circuits with spare bits of wire.
At the end of it, all they're left with is some broken toys and hopefully a recording of an oscillator burning up as it's shorted to something else.
My other first post is car post.
A band called Self (www.selfies.com) has already created and released an entirely toy-instrument based album titled "Gizmodgery" - search Amazon for it. It was released on Dreamworks in 2002. The US version is out of print, but the Japanese import is still available. It is a brilliant album of REAL songs, not jokes and I would recommend checking it out. Check www.selfies.com, they may have some downloads available.
Elliott Smith Tribute CD available now on Double D Records! Visit www.doubledrecords.com to order.
ok, not as early on as some of the industrial bands, but the c64 had a program that would play music using the stepper motor of the 1541 floppy drive. i even think there was an amiga version too.
I always thought that creating new tapes for Teddy Ruxpin would be fun. Just figure out the signal to move the mouth and then record some soft of porn type tape and have him move his mouth to the words. They killed the doll from the market before I had a chance to get that project going. Dang....
Every instrument on this album is a toy.
Gizmodgery
There's an album by Self called Gizmodgery. It was made entirely with Fisher Price toys. It's pretty hard to find, but definitely worth the effort. Here are a couple of reviews:
here's one
here's another
I saw a portion of Nicolas Collins' entertaining workshop at the Tank last night in NYC. Incredibly fun and interesting stuff no matter which side of the noise versus music argument you find yourself, particularly if you are curious about hacking CD players, licking circuit boards, etc... Mr. Collins is an assistant professor at the Art Institute of Chicago and Editor-in-Chief for the LMJ and is teaching a 3-week workshop on Circuit Bending in June. I haven't been able to find any links to the workshop just yet.
yeah..Matmos, the electronic group who did a lot of the beat programming for Bjork's last album Vespertine, are big into circuit bending. I mean, for electronic-focused music, there's only so many things you can do with an 808. More groups are breaking out of the confines of dance music, and I think that's a Good Thing.
I haven't gotten into Japanese noise yet, but have heard of it. When I was on emusic.com I did download a couple of various artists noise albums that included Japanese artists.
What I can say is that a performance of an Oakland project Noisegate is also in my top 10 performances. It was so loud I had earplugs and my hands over my ears for the entire 30 minutes of their performance. You didn't exactly listen to it as much as feel it. They had a guitar and two keyboardists (I think) but you wouldn't be able to tell there was a guitar from listening to a recording of it.
Noise isn't high on my music priorities, but there are some noise projects that do really impress me.
I'll have to check out this Merzbow project. Thanks.
I hate Liberals and Conservatives.
If you are a Liberal or a Conservative, then HAVE A NICE DAY!
Courage.
the official site would be anti-theory.com the homepage to the man who created/coined circuit bending..Reed Ghazala