The Touch-Radio

The Touch-Radio was, design-wise, by far my easiest project to date.  This was for the simple reason that it’s essentially the circuit board out of an old transistor radio, more or less unaltered!

I had had the radio for about 40 years: about 20 years ago, I took it out of its case – which has subsequently disappeared – and rewired the tuning and volume controls, evidently intending to do something with it.

I forget now whether I ever did – probably not – but I found it again recently, just as I was finishing the Cracklephone, and thinking about touch-controlled sound-makers; so I decided to connect a battery clip and speaker and see if it made a noise.

It did!  And I soon discovered that by touching certain parts of the exposed circuit board interesting sounds could be coaxed out of it – often not entirely unlike the Cracklephone, but with an element of speech incorporated.  Touching the aerial did frequently amplify the received radio signal, but it was rare for speech to become readily intelligible.

So I decided to leave it at that! – apart from putting the speaker, volume control and power in a box, to keep it neat.  A PP3 battery would just about fit inside, but it also has a socket for  external power.

I’d recently obtained some small plastic jewellery boxes, which looked good for small projects (some more are described elsewhere in the blog), so I used one of these.  There was also room for two 3.5mm sockets and two 4mm banana sockets, which I added, as I had done for the Cracklephone, to allow a microphone to be attached to the Touch-Radio or the Touch-Radio to be connected to an external loudspeaker.

I’ve always been interested in manipulating speech sounds, and have a number of projects in mind utilising radios in different ways.  I haven’t started working on these yet, but the Touch-Radio is the first in the series.

Circuit-Bending

Circuit bending is rather nicely described in the Wikipedia (at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circuit_bending) as the ‘creative customization’ of electronic devices such as ‘low voltage, battery-powered guitar effects, children’s toys and small digital synthesizers to create new musical or visual instruments and sound generators’.

The true method of approaching circuit-bending (IMHO, as they say) is experimental, without having – or without deliberately using – knowledge of the circuit you’re working on; the enjoyment of chance discovery is an important element of the experience, which is why I have distinguished it in my projects from ‘modification’, where I felt a knowledge of electronics and the circuitry being worked on was a useful thing.

The guru of circuit-bending is Qubais Reed Ghazala (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reed_Ghazala), and his book Circuit-Bending : Build Your Own Alien Instruments (pub. Wiley, 2005, ISBN 978-0764588877) is the standard work on the subject.  It explains how he came to discover the idea of ‘bending’ – leaving a small, battery-powered amplifier in a desk drawer, the power on and the back off, where a metal object in the drawer touched parts of the circuit and produced marvellous noises – illustrates some of the instruments he has created over the years, and gives detailed instructions on how to ‘bend’ some popular electronic instruments and toys available today.

If you’re not able to obtain a copy of Reed Ghazala’s book, you can read about it on his website at www.anti-theory.com, and follow a step-by-step tutorial at www.anti-theory.com/soundart/circuitbend/cb01.html.

A fabulous website for electronic music fans is www.electro-music.com; in this case a browse through their Circuit-bending forum at http://electro-music.com/forum/forum-113.html will throw up heaps of advice on what devices to get and what do with them once you’ve got them.  This may at the outset involve only making sure it’s using batteries, not plugged into the mains, switching it on, wetting your finger and poking the circuit board until something interesting happens.

So, if you’d like to get into electronic music, but are put off because you know nothing about electronics, then circuit-bending may be the thing for you, as Ghazala emphasises the fact that no knowledge is required!  Right at the beginning of Chapter 1 of his book he tells the story of taking his first circuit-bent instrument to school, ‘synthesizing birds, helicopters, and police sirens on the instrument, and running electricity through several people at a time so that we could play the device by touching each others’ bare flesh.’  His teacher is very impressed, looking at the dials and switches and hearing the extraordinary sounds.  ‘Mr Ghazala,’ he says, ‘I didn’t know you knew anything about electronics.’ ‘I leaned forward’, Ghazala tells us, ‘looked him straight in the eye, and said, ‘I don’t.’

At the time of writing I haven’t begun any of my planned projects in circuit-bending, but I’ve been collecting some suitable devices to work on.  I’ll report on these as soon as I’ve been able to get started; in the meantime, here are some of the items I’ve acquired.  I’m particularly interested in the human voice in this context, so you will see a Texas Instruments ‘Speak and Spell’ amongst them, a Vtech ‘Alphabet Apple’ and a Casio SK-60, famous for its ‘human voice’ presets.

 

 

How I started

I’m writing this Blog to document some work I’ve been doing in the field of electronic music-making.

I wasn’t an expert in any of these things before I started – and I’m probably not an expert in any of them now, but I’ve learned a lot as I’ve gone on, and I hope if I can pass it on it’ll be a source of interest and in some small way an inspiration to others who are getting involved in this field

When I began thinking about this project I decided to do it in the following way:

a).  To avoid working with computers (until the very end).

I’d used computers extensively in my music before, from Logic for straightforward composed pieces to a variety of other programs for electronic composition or sound treatment.  I expected to return to using the computer in the end, but with the benefit – hopefully – of new knowledge and new sound devices.

b).  To incorporate where relevant some projects I’d started, and mostly not finished, many years ago.

I’d made some guitar effects with a degree of success that could be described as ‘mixed’ – some of them I use to this day, which work very well and can’t or don’t need to be replaced by anything new; some are still around, not quite working the way they were intended to; some never worked at all!

So I decided not to go back to guitar effects, but to concentrate on sound producing devices.

c).  To explore certain specific ‘movements’ in electronic sound-producing, such as ‘circuit bending’ and ‘Lunetta’ devices, and construct some of the ‘classic’ designs along the way.

d).  To explore alternative methods of music input – isomorphic keyboards, game controllers, and other home made devices.

One of the intentions behind this was to create music in more of an informal and  ‘live’ way than I had done using the computer; another was to explore the variety of music- and noise-producing devices now available – usually cheaply in sales, second-hand shops and on eBay.

I also wanted to pursue my obsession with the Stylophone, an early electronic synthesiser of the late 60’s and early 70’s, but recently reintroduced.

I’ve divided the different parts of the project into the following categories:

1.  Modification

In this first phase I would take existing devices and add new features, or expand existing ones.

My principle in doing this was understanding the circuits (to a certain degree) and making appropriate changes to produce specific effects.

2.  Construction

Phase 2 was to build a number of sound-producing devices from scratch, using circuit diagrams and descriptions from books and magazines (I had a number of these collected over the years, and hand-drawn circuits copied from publications in libraries) and from the internet.

Again, a certain amount of understanding of the principles of the circuits would be necessary.

3.  Circuit Bending

In this phase the idea was to take existing electronic instruments – children’s toys mostly – and make them produce sounds they were never intended to produce, mostly without worrying too much about the circuits that produced these sounds and how they were working, which I felt was more within the spirit of the enterprise.

4.  Freeform designs

The intention then was to extend the knowledge gained in previous phases to create new designs, partly modified, partly constructed, incorporating past ideas I had had, but never put into practice and new ideas discovered through experimentation.

5.  Software/MIDI

This phase was to be mainly computer-based, involving programming, which I had not done before.

As it turned out, I was overtaken by events, and parallel with the Modification and Construction, have got involved in some slightly different areas.  However, I’ll write about each of my projects in order, and put them in the appropriate category.