Making Beautiful Music By Circuit Bending
from the noise-generator dept
With all the disposable electronic gadgetry that seems to accumulate around us, it’s nice to see that people still use old electronics to do cool stuff. No, not making a fishtank out of an iMac. We’re talking about “circuit-bending” music — made from hacking old speak-and-spells, Furby dolls and dot matrix printers. Granted, it’s not a completely new concept since I seem to recall Jimi Hendrix used to re-wrap the coils in his guitar pickups to get more feedback and flavor to his sound. But it’s interesting that the interfaces for musical instruments may be becoming more and more circuit-driven. For example, there’s even a grand piano made from a circuit printed on cardboard. Obviously, it’s not like classical instruments are ever going to die completely, but maybe kids won’t have to lug around big trombones anymore. Or maybe circuit-bending music will get killed off when these circuit-bent musicians get sued for inappropriately hacking the hardware they use.
