Beyond bending: Triggering, sequencing, and modulating circuit-bent toys

Traditionally, making functional electronic objects has necessitated a fair grasp of theory and a pretty clear idea of what you wanted to make before you pick up your soldering iron. In the mid-1990s, Reed Ghazala pushed this serendipity back to the fore of electronic practice with his fervent advocacy of what he dubbed “circuit bending.” Like Michel Waisvisz, as an adolescent in the late 1960s, Ghazala encountered the sounds of accidental circuit interaction: an open amplifier left in his desk drawer shorted against some metal and began whistling. Many modern toys do not have the ability to play a sound before the previous sound has completed its cycle. Using multiple square wave oscillators to trigger sounds on your toy can produce complex rhythms since the rate of each oscillator is independent from the others. This creates cool phasing patterns as well as complex wave shaping when the driving oscillators are tuned to audio range.