I haven't been able to go toy-hunting yet, so thought I'd start out this weekend by ripping apart some of my old and un-used guitar pedals. A few might be interesting to try and hack; others I might just use to scavenge some parts. Some have incredibly simple ciruits, so I thought I'd look through them to remind myself what all the different components look like. Here's a distortion pedal that I started with:
Not really much to the circuit and nothing interesting to use in terms of this project, but I thought I'd play about with something easy at first - there's also very little to break here!
After familiarisng myself with the layout and components, I thought I'd try something more interesting/uesful. I got an analog delay pedal from ebay a year or so ago that can be pushed into self-osscilation to make some really crazy sounds, so thought I'd have a look and see what else I could force it to do. The circuit board is much more complex:
This pedal never really worked properly; the delayed signal was always really faint and garbled unless you powered it with an 18v supply - strange for a pedal that is supposed to run from a single 9v battery! Since it wasn't really working properly, I thought I'd dive right in and make some noise. Unfortunately, this approach backfired as the pedal died as soon as I touched a wire to one of the chips:(
So, my first attempts have not been too successful. However, I do have all the tools and parts that I need to get started properly, I just need to get something easier to work on. I have a drum machine, minidisc recorder, iPod nano and an old mobile phone that I was hoping to use for this project, but don't want to see them go the same way as my delay pedal. I think some practice on some cheap toys might be the best option...
Earlier this week I gave circuit bending a crack for the first time. I only had a few jumper cables and a soldering iron so couldn't do things like attach switches etc. I was just trying to familiarise myself with opening toys, and looking around circuit boards.
The first toy I tried is pictured below. I didn't get very far; i connected two points on the board that caused the sound AND lights to die, and it wouldn't come back on, even after turning it off, changing batteries etc. Very annoying - I thought that wasn't supposed to happen! I wasn't using a soldering iron or anything. Ah well, BALL-E as he's now known died a premature death :-/
BALL-E : 2010 - 2011
I moved through a few other devices, only really managing to adjust pitch by using body contact. Couldn't find anything interesting... though the toy collection I currently have is a tad undernourished. I managed to make a really old talking phone do this:
Circuit-Bent Toy Phone - Looping/Pitch Bend
Apologies for the crummy vid quality. I figured out how to loop a sample by connecting to points. I did not solder these together, just made loops in the ends of the cables so they could hang round each other hence stay in contact. I have some hi-res pics but cannot upload them just yet. By rubbing my thumb on one part it changed the pitch. Got some really interesting low tones out of this which I imagine could soon pretty decent when output through loudspeakers via a 1/4" jack connection.
I also started prodding around my mini Yamaha PortaSound organ and this is looking far more promising. I've found some cool things such as adding distortion (and other strange noises) and merging beats on the drum machine.
Opened Yamaha PortaSound
I've ordered a bunch of components from an electronics website. Hopefully I get the stuff early next week so I can make something to bring to our next meeting -- I think on Wednesday.
Today we met again with Brad and Eleni showing us some basic hacking skills. We opened a couple of toys and had a poke around with some wires.
We learned to work around the 'audio brains' of a circuit, normally identified by a small black blob or spider-looking thing! We are told that these are the scientific terms for such items.
Due to the short amount of time and lack of resources today we never got much in the way of solid hacks happening, but the three of us got a clear idea of how to go around it. It's up to us to familiarise ourselves with the 'art' in our own time.
We plan to work on some individual hacks and show each other our work next wednesday. Once we start getting some circuit-bent instruments we can begin wrapping our heads around the compositional/interactive aspect of the project.
There is a lecture on hardware hacking tomorrow and a workshop on Friday, so by this time next week we should all be experts! Here's hoping...
Oh, and we never got round to taking much in the way of pics/vids bar this fuzzy snap:
It's a keyboard which Eleni's boyfriend hacked and includes contacts pins as well as a looping mechanism... very nice!
So here goes the first blog post i've ever made...
Last week the Unwanted Orchestra DMSP group met for the first time. Tutored by Bradley Burns and Eleni Kontesidou, the group consists of:
Jordan Craig
Clive Mitchell
Zhaocheng Xu
Our project is to do with the art of circuit bending, particularly on kids musical toys such as keyboards, speak n' spells etc. With no prior knowledge of this craft, we will learn to modify and transform seemingly dull 'toys' into interesting and eccentric 'instruments'!
We had a quick chat about what the ultimate goal of the project will be. It seems most likely we will create a piece of semi-improvisational music and perform it in front of an audience.
Extensions of this were discussed with a view of adding an interactive element to the performance, where audience members can participate by 'playing' the modified instruments along with the 3 of us. Obvious alarm bells start ringing here, of course. What happens if an audience member abuses or breaks an instrument? Can we control an audience member's output so that it is not musically detrimental to the piece? How do we communicate our ideas to audience members? Suffice it to say, there are a lot of potential issues we would have to prepare for but it'd be really cool to get this happening. Perhaps split the performance so one half is played by us, the other half is more of an installation? Who knows what we'll do!
We also talked about linking some hacked toys up to a laptop via an arduino board, so that the laptop could control elements of the toy, but the toy could also be used to trigger 'things' from the laptop. What these 'things' would be is hard to say as we wouldn't want to use any pre-recorded audio. Perhaps we could record live samples of sounds generated during the performance and use these hybrid arduino-toys to trigger that audio from a Max/MSP buffer!? All very hypothetical just now, but we wanted to get as many ideas rolling as possible.
We also liked the idea of getting our hands on some old games consoles and 'hacking' them to give us some visuals. We could use a projector to expand these images. Perhaps we could also find a way to link the visuals to the music... I know absolutely ZERO about console hacking and so don't know if this is possible - but it's a nice thought!
Research Articles
The Folk Music of Chance Electronics: Circuit-Bending the Modern Coconut
Qubais Reed Ghazala
Leonardo Music Journal, Vol. 14, Composers inside Electronics: Music after David Tudor (2004), pp. 96-104
Composers inside Electronics: Music after David Tudor
Nicolas Collins
Leonardo Music Journal, Vol. 14, Composers inside Electronics: Music after David Tudor (2004), pp. 1-3
Getting Started In Electronics
Forrest M. Mims
Handmade Electronic Music - The Art Of Hardware Hacking
Nicolas Collins
Videos
I thought it'd be a good idea to post a few interesting/helpful videos each week, so here goes nothing...
A simple circuit bending example
A hacked nintendo controlled by modular synthesiser
