From Circuitbending to Soundmangling

 

Last June I received this little Toy Phone. Excited to start my first step into circuitbending I opened the little monster only to encounter a big disapointment. The whole electronics were actually in a small plastic bubble. No points to connect and get surprising sounds. Opening the bubble would for sure have had a destructive effect on the contents.

 

 

So here is where I ended up instead. I added an output plug, removed the build in speaker and replaced it with a 10 Ohm resistor and added a 1 microfarad capacitor in series to avoid damage to my mixer.

Time to record all the short songs. I opened them in Audacity, cut away excessive low end bellw 30Hz and same hightones above 17500Hz. Normalized the files, and saved them into my Octatrack.

Now I can slice these files, manipulate them in many ways, add effects. while sequencing them. This approach could (at least for me) be the future replacement of Circuitbending, since the usual suspects (electronics) go more and more the inaccessability way. Will publish some results soon.

The cost free alternative to the Octatrack would be the Beatslicer Shuriken which can export the slices as a drumset for the Hydrogen software drum machine..