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Bent on experimentation

Creating new and unusual music

COURTESY OF: DANIEL GREENFELD

Circuit benders tweak equipment during the Intro to Circuit Bending Workshop at the 2007 Bent Festival in Los Angeles. The festival invites benders from across the country to showcase and study their art.

By Thomas Cullen

July 24, 2008 | 12:00 a.m. CST

Green, silver, bronze and black are the colors on a circuit board. Although they might not be the colors of conventional beauty, adhering to those norms isn’t at the heart of circuit bending. But oddity, experimentation and unpredictability are. The people who do this renegade circuit redirection are using the electronics of sound to make the music they want to hear.

“You don’t need to know a lot about electronics at all,” says Dominick Dufner, a 24-year-old Columbian who has been circuit bending for two and a half years. He has learned more about electronics from circuit bending than from any book, he says. He experiments with everything. In Dufner’s hands, an electronic Texas Chainsaw Massacre Halloween toy can be used to make music. Sure, the activity might be obscure, but Dufner likes it that way.

What is Circuit Bending?

Circuit bending is taking the circuitry of electronic devices and shorting out the circuit to affect the tones and sound waves. Circuit benders use anything from alligator clips to their wet fingers in the process. The soldering points on the circuit board are set to direct the current in a way that will produce the same result every time. Think of a Speak-and-Spell: You push the button labeled “A,” and the machine says “A.” Benders reroute the current and send it places it was never meant to go.

Learn more:


• The Tank, thetanknyc.org
• The Bent Festival, bentfestival.org
• The Blip Festival, blipfestival.org
• 8bitcollective.com


--THOMAS CULLEN
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Bending the Rules

Circuit benders extract the circuit boards of electronic devices and experiment by connecting points and wires on the board that were never meant to touch, says Mike Rosenthal, managing director at The Tank Space, a performing arts center in New York City. The result of this rewiring is a device that can have new and multipe uses.

The Tank also puts on the Blip Festival, which is geared toward creators of chip-tune music. Chip-tune music is any music that comes from the sound chips of older video game systems such as ColecoVision, Atari 2600 and even the Nintendo Game Boy. YouTube videos show people breaking apart their Game Boys to produce new, harsh sounds by rewiring them; one guy uses the little device to accompany him on a ukulele.

Many programs exist to help people alter Game Boys and other electronic devices. Rob Tygett, an electronic musician in St. Louis, says Nanoloop is a popular one. The program is a cartridge that’s placed in the Game Boy and connected to an output device, such as speakers or headphones, to generate new sounds. Once connected, the program allows the user to create cheap-sounding noises by entering combinations of numbers.

Developed by Abe Pralle, a computer science lecturer at Northern Arizona University, the Game Boy Sound Manipulator is another tool used by chip-tune musicians. Pralle says new sounds are made in the little rectangle by altering the sound’s basic components, such as pitch, envelope and waveform. “Game Boy sounds are made by setting a handful of register values for one of four different built-in sound types,” he wrote in an e-mail.

Pralle says his software is one of the simpler ways to make chip-tune music: “The GBSM is a simple but useful tool that allows you to easily change the sound parameters in real time on the Game Boy and instantly hear the new sound.”

Sampling the Sounds

Listening to chip-tune music makes you want to play old video games. The hasty pace of the sounds conjures images of small pixelated people running on a screen. The blips of the Game Boy blended with rapid-fire drums make the songs sound destined for a foamy Vegas nightclub. But too much of it might give you a headache because of its erratic nature. Still, it is oddly fun and just like reading a good book — you always want to hear what is going to happen next.

Twentieth-century musician and painter Luigi Russolo would be proud of circuit benders and chip-tune musicians. In 1913, he offered up his thoughts on sound, noise and music in his essay The Art of Noise. He, like the benders, embraced the unique and innovative. “This limited circle of pure sounds must be broken, and the infinite variety of ‘noise-sound’ must be conquered,” he wrote.

Today, circuit benders are following Russolo’s lead and literally ripping conventional and unorthodox sound sources apart. For these innovators, the board that powers electronics is just a canvas. We’ll just have to wait and see what art they’ll make next.

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