Circuit Bending Super Edit (Tinkerbell Wand to Expressive Instrument)

I’ve just posted a re-edit of my series introducing circuit-bending old toys (cutting the three-video series down into a more reasonably paced single video). Circuit-bending is the creative customization of consumer electronics with the goal of inventing new unique devices for sound-making, visuals, or other expressive goals.

In this series, now edited into a single video, I take you through my process with some toys from the start, including explorations, experiments, and, importantly, failures. I continue work through transforming this Tinkerbell wand, testing out different resistors and switches to see what I might add to increase its glitchy expressive range.

I’m a composer and sound-designer, not an electrical engineer, so my goal is to find fun sounds that I can use in creative ways (rather than any kind of serious circuit design).

0:00 Intro
0:22 Selecting toys to bend
0:52 Testing with new batteries
1:52 Opening up the Tinkerbell wand
4:42 Opening up the whack-a-mole
7:20 Poking around with test leads
10:40 Recap, equipment
11:11 Examining the components
12:20 Speeding up the clock
14:17 Slowing down the clock
15:19 Varying the clock
18:58 Switches
22:17 The “glitch switch”
24:40 Considering packaging (instrument morphology)
25:19 Tools & equipment
26:15 Updates/Plan
28:32 Installing the “Glitch Switch”
30:48 Installing the Toggle
31:47 Changing the LED
32:47 Installing the Potentiometer
34:17 Adding RCA audio out
35:18 Putting it back together
36:08 Esoteric Etude
38:31 Closing


More circuit-bending and handmade electronic music here:

Pure Data Mid/Side Ring Modulation: Patch from Scratch (no talking)

Having some fun using mid/side stereo for sound design in Pure Data vanilla.

Here, we encode our stereo signal into mid/side with some simple math, then ring-modulate and delay the side material before decoding back into left-right stereo.

0:00 Bleep bloops in left-right stereo
1:12 Creating a mid/side encoder & decoder
2:19 Adding ring modulation to only the sides
3:23 Adding a delay to the sides
4:49 Expanding the range of ring modulation

Click here for a deeper explanation of mid/side stereo and synthesis:

More no-talking Pure Data videos here:

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