Massaging the Machine: Circuit Bending with Ben Goldstone

Often thought of as complicated and coldly precise, electronics can be manipulated to one’s advantage with less technical skill and more creativity. Such is the philosophy of our class’ guest speaker on circuit bending, Benjamin Goldstone. To Ben we can explore electronics by “massaging circuit boards” through touching the connections and “destroying the mind of the machine.”

A relatively new phenomenon, circuit bending is essentially shorting portable electronic audio devices at will to create new and often noisy sounds. Ben kicked off the first hour of class by demonstrating a handful of bent gear. They were usually gutted and mangled toys beyond their original conditions. In one case, Ben tore open a Furby, licked his fingers, and began shorting the back of the circuit board with the voltage potential of his body. This produced bizarre and creepy sounds out of a once cute electronic pet. More interestingly, Ben hacked into cheap instrument effects pedals to give breadth to their limited palettes. In one case, he opened an old Roland drum machine and added an RCA patch board, which twisted, reversed, and distorted its rhythms. Click below for a short video by Jeremy demonstrating this.

Next, all the students chose toys that were acquired at trunk sales outside of London. According to Ben, these were weekend sales in which desperate Britts sold belongings out of their trunks. We weren’t quite sure what to do, but that was the point. It was imperative that we produced wildly new sounds, and it only made sense that there was no general, methodological way to do it. As Ben said, “[we] might give it a little tickle here and there.” Eventually, Ben taught us how to solder, how to read schematics and best of all, how to build a ghetto speaker to make our mutated toys scream.

For the most part, the circuit bending projects were successful, and we made sure to keep track of our time so that we could move on—though hours could have easily been spent “tickling” the toys. Now that’s music to my ears.

-Ollie Moltaji