by Jacob Goldstein
NARR:
The Speak 'n' Spell is a talking educational toy. Its voice is familiar to almost any American between the ages of 25 and 35.
TAPE:
(Sound of regular Speak 'n' Spell.)
NARR:
The sound of Reed Ghazala's Speak 'n' Spell is considerably less familiar.
TAPE:
This is a circuit bent speak and spell. (Sp and sp starts to make noise.) I'll make it loop. NOISE OF SPEAK AND SPELL FADES UNDER.
NARR:
Ghazala is the man who coined the term circuit bending. He normally buys they toys he modifies at second-hand stores, But he was so excited by the Speak 'n' Spell that he paid retail for one the day the toy came out in 1978. Since then, he's bent hundreds of them.
TAPE:
NOISE OF SPEAK AND SPELL COMES UP, GHAZALA SAYS:
Once you have a good loop going, you can then, oh, pitch modulate the loop, vibrate it with a vibrato body contact, here, I'll show you that. NOISE OF SPEAK AND SPELL FADES UNDER.
NARR:
To modify this Speak 'n' Spell, Ghazala removed the back of the toy and soldered wires onto the circuit board in strategic spots. He connected the wires to switches, knobs and an old radio dial mounted to the front of the toy. Now his Speak 'n' Spell looks like a tricked out version of the regular toy -- the switches and knobs complement the original panel. Ghazala works the controls, sending the pitch diving and climbing and calling forth one strange sound after another.
TAPE:
COMES UP: You can also bring the pitch way down. SPEAK 'N' SPELL FADES OUT.
The Speak 'n' Spell is just one of countless pieces of home electronics Ghazala has modified in his 37-year career. His initial circuit-bending breakthrough came in the late 1960s. He was about 14 years old, at his house in Cincinatti, rummaging through a drawer that held a small, battery-powered speaker.
TAPE:
I closed the drawer and from inside the drawer I heard (whistle) I didn't know what to think because I'd never heard this little amp make any noise on its own. Opened the drawer, the sound stopped. So i poked at it and the sound began aain . i realized it was a short circuit, i knew that wasn't supposed to be happening to the amplifier. i thought if that can happen by accident what can happen by purpose? in the ensuing 37 years i have short circuited every battery powered audio dev that i could get my hands on.
NARR:
Ghazala hasn't been content just to short-circuit audio devices; he considers himself a musician, and he's made whole albums of the sounds his instruments make. He says he gets hundreds of thousands of visitors to his Web site every month and sells many of the instruments he makes. Ghazala is widely known among circuit benders, and at the festival he is something of a guru. He looks the part -- long hair, round glasses, faded T-shirt.
BRING UP ROOM NOISE OF WORKSHOP
One afternoon, about 50 circuit-bending neophytes pay $7 each to attend a workshop Ghazala leads at the funky midtown arts space that is hosting the festival.
NARR:
The would-be benders sit at small tables in groups of three and four. Each table is equipped with a screwdriver, a few loose wires, and a couple of battery-powered toys. Ghazala walks among them giving advice and encouragement.
BRING UP ROOM NOISE OF WORKSHOP, THEN GHAZALA AMB:
That's the luck of the game. Sometimes you find something great, sometimes you don't. There might be other toys over there. If you get discouraged with this, grab another one.
ROOM NOISE FADES UNDER NARR:
Mike Pinto and Steve Pine left Boston at 7 a.m. to be sure they wouldn't miss the festival. SOUND OF THEM TALKING At their table in the middle of the room, Pinto struggles with a white plastic toy.
TAPE:
I don know what it is -- some kind of telephone with a bear playing guitar. I'm going to remove the back and start making it go crazy.
ROOM NOISE FADES UNDER NARR:
Pinto and Pine met at the Berklee College of Music. Pine is a guitarist, and he describes circuit bending as a logical progression from the prepared music of the composer John Cage. Pinto, a vibraphonist, tries to put a finer point on it.
TAPE:
I think the whole idea is to make a control soudn become uncontrollable, but to be able to control that uncontrollableness.
NARR:
At the next table, Sean von Reagan has brought in an old keyboard and taken the back off.
TAPE:
WHAM SONG FROM KEYBOARD
NARR:
As the keyboard plays a preprogrammed Wham song, vonReagan pokes at a transistor on the circuitboard.
TAPE:
WHAM TURNS TO RHYTHMIC NOISE
NARR:
Von Reagan plays drums in a band, and he hears potential in the bent keyboard.
TAPE:
You could layer it with percussion and have this in the background
NARR:
By this time, Pinto and Pine have used a series of guitar clips to wire the guitar-playing bear phone to a green plastic bongo drum.
TAPE:
Noise of Pinto and Pine's toy.
NARR:
They are smiling broadly and poking at the circuits with their fingers.
TAPE:
Well, this looks like crazyness right now, but it actually makes a lot of sense. There's mainly one button that makes everything go into the other dimension.
NARR:
A few minutes later, the workshop is winding down, and Pine has returned to this dimension. He says he first heard of circuit bending three weeks ago, but he's already thinking about his next project.
TAPE:
I already got a couple speak and spells and touch 'n' tells ready to go.
NARR:
Pine is entering a community that is more virtual than physical. More than a thousand people subscribe to the largest Yahoo circuit bending group. But many of them have never met another bender, according to Festival organizer Mike Rosenthal.
TAPE:
Everybody's been so superexcited to be here because all of a sudden they're in a room full of people just as geeky as they are, and they can sort of geek out a little bit.
NARR:
Bill Miller definitely seems excited to be at the festival. During the workshop, he alternates between walking around with a video camera and tinkering with the circuitry of a keyboard. Miller owns the domain circuitbending.com, and he uses circuit-bent instruments to create albums under the apt name orgy of noise. He says he's long been an admirer of Ghazala, but until the festival the two had only met on the internet.
TAPE:
You know how you have imaginary internet friends who you know better than your real friends? Technically I know him, but it's like knowing your favorite TV sitcom star. You think you know them, but you don't.
NARR:
Some internet friendships become nasty when benders jealously guard their secrets, according to Peter Blaser.
TAPE:
It's a lot easier to be more negative and more aggressive when you can hide behind the computer screen. So when people come out to something like this and they're face to face, everyone's smiles and suggestions and ideas.
NARR:
Blaser is a master bender who has been invited to the festival as an artist in residence. He seems to be so far out ahead of the other Benders that it's hard to imagine him getting ideas from anyone else.
MELODY COMES UP, FADES UNDER.
On the last night of the festival, Blaser is sitting in in front of a few keyboards and a wooden contraption that looks a little like an antique cash register. Inside the window where the price would be on a cash register is a splinning plastic wheel with grooves that trigger a row of metal tines, like the wheel of a music box. On the front of the contraption are a series of switches, and what looks like an old switchboard. One of the keyboards is wired into the switchboard. Blaser has an absurdly prosaic name for this machine: The mechanical camshaft sequencer.
TAPE:
What's gonna happen to this machine? I'm gonna smash it into a million pieces. Is that true? No. I'm gonna sell it for lots of money. Is that true? Yes. MUSIC FADES OUT
NARR:
Fifteen hundred dollars to be precise, to the former lead singer of the band Faith No More. And another one is on order from the lead singer of the band the Melvins. Blaser estimates he's put 500 hours of work into the piece, which save for a timer and a simple motor is entirely mechanical. When it is done, it will act as a central processing center for several instruments, allowing one musician to set several instruments looping at once, and adjust the tempo. There are, of course, mass produced machines that do this, but they are not hand made and no one would call them works of art.
Blaser gives the sequencer a test drive.
TAPE:
So I'm previewing my recorded sequence here just by manually pressing the button. Now I'm goint to turn the sequencer on an it should ...
NARR:
He flips a switch on the sequencer, and the keyboard begins to automatically play the melody.
TAPE:
Now I'm going to adjust the melody. Now I'm going to start plugging in patch chords, and it may crash, so here goes nothin. (music stops). Well, there it goes.
NARR:
Blaser is 25 years old. He studied sculpture in college, and was interested in circuit bending the first time he heard about it. He ordered 30 Speak 'n' Spells off of eBay and spent months doing nothing but working on Speak 'n' Spell bends. Over the course of TK years, he worked his way up to the mechanical camshaft sequencer.
TAPE:
What's made it possible is just complete, total obsession. Absolutely every day working oon stuff. Getting new toys every single day. Not getting a job, so I have time to work on this stuff. Just complete obsession.
NARR:
The sense of sharing such a peculiar obsession is what unites the benders at the festival. Many of them work on their hobby alone. Some who have tried to play out have been met with hostility. When Ghazala brought an early circuit-bent instrument onstage at a concert at a neighborhood church in the late 1960s, the crowd became enraged.
TAPE: GHAZALA:
I remember being socked in the side of the head and in the stomach. What I remember most was the crunching sound of my instrument when they crushed it.
NARR:
Thirty seven years later, Ghazala was overwhelmed by the reception that met him when he arrived at the festival.
TAPE:
I cried the first day. I stood downstairs and I cried because people were so kind to me.
NARR:
After nearly 40 of circuit bending, Ghazala has found his fellow benders. Jacob Goldstein, Columbia Radio News.