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By: Ikedi Ani-okoye.

Circuit bending explained

Circuit bending is the creative short-circuiting of devices such as low voltage, battery-powered guitar effects, children's toys and small synthezisers to create new musical instruments and sound generators. Emphasizing spontaneity and randomness, the techniques of circuit bending have been commonly associated with noise music, though many more conventional contemporary musicians and musical groups have been known to experiment with "bent" instruments.

Circuit bening in action

If you learn to solder and can drill a small hole to mount a switch in, you can circuit-bend. Everything else is a process of non-technical, routine experimentation in which various short-circuits are created in an attempt to alter the target device's audio behavior.

Audio toys not only are easy to circuit-bend, but also are capable of sonic eccentricities beyond belief. The newly-implemented line-output's voice, sharpened with EQ and expanded with reverb (standards in the electronic studio), when fed into an amp or recording console easily stands on its own.

Bending Crystal Clocks

Crystal or ceramic resonator clocks are designed to remain at a stable fixed frequency. Effective circuit bending is to replace the existing resonator with one at half the original frequency. Fitting a DPDT switch allows you to select between the original and half speed clocks. A splendid side-effect is that switching clocks may well crash the circuit in an interesting manner.

CONCLUSION

Circuit Bending was a term first used by bending pioneer Reed Ghazala, to refer to the art of taking an ordinary electronic toy such as a Texas Instruments Speak&Spell, and rewiring the circuitry to produce a device capable of creating all manner of weird and unlikely sounds.