Circuit Bent Devices

Circuit Bending, if you haven't heard of it, is taking something electronic that makes noise and transforming the sounds it creates into something more exotic by creating short circuits. It has become very popular in recent years with circuit bent devices, especially Speak & Spells, going for hefty sums of money. I'll show you how to make a circuit bent Speak & Spell for less than $30!

You can read about one of the foremost pioneers, see examples of his work and hear them in action at Reed Ghazala's website: Anti-Theory.Com Or check out his book Circuit Bending: Build Your Own Alien Instrumentwhich I highly recommend. if you are really into getting some cool, strange sounds from all kinds of sources another great resource is Handmade Electronic Music: The Art of Hardware Hacking

Reed's prices are pretty high at over $1000 for a bent Speak unit. On Ebay a circuit bent Speak & Spell will go for $100-$150 with the top end at about $300. But if all you want to do is to record the weird sounds to your computer rather than actually playing the thing as an instrument, all you need is a little device I may have originated. I have never seen or heard of anyone else doing this, that's not to say they haven't. This is my independant discovery and as such revealing it should not ruffle any feathers.

A Cheaper Circuit Bent Speak & Spell

You need 2 things: A Sound Module and a Circuit Writing Pen.

The Module can be any Speak & Spell(red) module except Noun Endings. I think Ive bent all types by now, and Noun Endings is the only one that causes a certain glitch which crashes the unit.

You can find the Circuit Writer at any Radio Shack.

Are you ready for what took me about 60 hours to learn? All you have to do is draw a connection between 2 pins (5 and 7). That's it.

A little more detail.

Carefully open the module.
Hold the circuit so that the IC(black chip) is face down. The PC-A marking should be on the right. Look at the lower row of pins. The 1st pin is on the far left and the 14th pin is on the far right. Draw a neat, thick connection between the 5th and 7th pins. Put the unit back together, plug it into a Speak & Spell and fire away!