Learn About the History of Circuit Bending

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Part of the video series: How to Do Circuit Bending on Audio Electronics

Summary: Learn the history of circuit bending and how it produces different musical sounds and noises in this video series that will help you understand how and when to utilize this unique way of making music.

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By Lorin Parker
eHow Presenter

Lorin Parker works as an artist, audio engineer and instructor in sound and audio. He is currently a faculty member at the Art Institute of California, Los Angeles. Parker specializes...read more

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qrghazala said

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on 11/30/2009 Thanks for the interest but... Missed point! How can one describe or define circuit-bending without mentioning CHANCE? We are discussing the development of instruments, right? Chance is the very heart of bending.

Let's not miss the fact that the theremin and other examples are true-theory inventions. They were not developed via chance, as in the Incantor, or other bent instruments. So bending goes beyond "new use," since new use does not mandate chance, and in bending, chance is KEY.

And it is the Chance aspect of development that creates a category beyond simply "hacking," since hacking is often a non-chance process. Bending is always chance. Here's how I put it in a recent interview...

I would like to comment on one of your prior questions, that of hacking versus bending.

To me, while both are acts of “modding” (modifying), these two approaches to design are night and day. As a...

Video Transcript

"LORIN EDWIN PARKER: So, I'm going to talk to you a little bit about the history of circuit bending. Circuit bending, in its most popular form, the form that we see now in a myriad of websites all over the internet, was popularized by a gentleman named Reed Ghazala and he actually coined the term circuit bending. He's most famous for taking Speak & Spells, Speak & Maths, all kinds of toys of the 1970s and the 1980s, opening them up, changing the circuitry inside and then turning them into musical instruments. His theory is what he calls "antitheory" which is that's--you don't need to know anything about how electronics work. You don't need to know physics, you don't know need to know math, you don't even need to really know what the parts are. You just need to open up any battery-powered toy and start poking around with wires and with your fingers and eventually, you'll start creating some really neat sounds. Of course, sometimes you'll also blow up your toy. Sometimes, it will just stop making sounds. The results are unpredictable and that's really kind of the excitement of circuit bending. Now, preceding Reed Ghazala though, since this is really a form of hacking, people have been doing this kind of work for a really, really long time. And if you look back, my circuit here, this synthesizer, the Electrosparklavier, is based upon a German scientist's instrument, the Trautonium which was used as the sound effects for the movie "The Birds." And likewise, the Theremin which is a musical instrument that is played without even being touched is an instrument that takes similar background; they come from radio technologies. All of those scientists were radio operators in World War I that realized that they could create tones from their radios and turn those radios into musical instruments. So, the idea of turning one technology into another, especially in electronics, is not an old idea. But circuit bending itself, the terminology and probably the most [SOUNDS LIKE] "kosher" usage of it, as termed by Reed Ghazala, is the usage of toys and cheap electronics to make a simple musical instrument without electronics theory knowledge."