You were born a toy in Los Angeles, California.

Equipped with realistic voices, lights and 8 different games, you wait patiently at We Be Toys to fulfill your destiny: To burst from your colorful paper carton into the hands of some eager recipient, the perfect vessel for all the joy and training given you to impart.

But humans, you soon discover, are fickle - you are used as doorstop, bookend, missile, dog chew-toy - eventually your flashy decals fade and your instruction booklet is misplaced. You're finally superceeded by a newer, more advanced version of yourself. You're a has-been, an eyesore - garbage.

In the end you are met by a fate far worse than the dreaded trash bin: you are left to rot in the toy section of a decrepit local Salvation Army.

Months pass, perhaps years - it's impossible to measure time through the unending stream of old ladies, drunks and retro clothing hunters. You decay slowly in a dusty pile of a hundred of other rejects. On rare occassions you are prodded violently by drooling children then thrown on the floor to spite a sibling.

All in all, it's a horribly slow and terribly undignified way for any circuit to go out. You abandon all hope and await the inevitable: Complete corrosion of your battery terminals.

Then one day a very strange man shows-up and positively invades this toy cemetary. With tools and batteries from a small satchel, he's soon produced every sound possible from every toy in sight. Before you've gotten a handle on things, you are thrown into the trunk of a Trans Am with a few dozen others. You notice something you all have in common: You all make noise.

You awaken under a bright light. The strange man is staring at you through a pair of neon pink goggles that completely cover his eyes. You feel a chill and realize to your horror that your casing has been removed - you're completely naked!

With the dexterity of a surgeon, this mad toy hacker begins attaching clips and wires to points on the back of your circuit board, points that were never meant to be touched. Your resistances fluctuate violently as he snips soldered-on parts. Not only does he perform this gruesome vivesection while you are powered and awake, but he has used a clothespin to constantly trigger your 'I win' sample.

"ayeeiii wee eennn - a zt!"

But something is dreadfully wrong - "I win" is coming-out impossibly warped! You feel queesey, as if your organs are shifting - the toy hack approaches you with something like a pencil with a very hot tip and you feel faint. As you black out, you spy other victims of this sadistic electronic hobbyist arrayed about and realize this may very well be the end.

You come-to in an alien world. It must be an alien, you reason, because you see two of everything and it's all bright blue. Two of the toy hack smile down at you, hands working controls on your surface that you don't seem to recall even having. Strange and beautiful sounds come out of you as he does this and you suddenly realize that you have probably been reincarnated.

The toy hack has changed you, somehow - into something at once less and more than what you were - a re-interpretation of the creature described by your original design.

A new circuit . . . with an old soul.

You have new inputs, a bright blue pilot light, custom display, post-digital-holocaust paint job and a new name: Bloody Mary. You perform your special audio magic regularly in his studio, on equal footing with prestigous high-tech synths, processors and other advanced toy lifeforms like yourself. You are revered, admired by the toy hack's friends and adored by fans as far away as Japan.

You never go into disuse - instead you go on display ... the toy hack grooms you regularly and only serves the freshest high-output batteries.

All in all it's not a bad life for a circuit. Not too bad at all.

The insidious danger of circuit-bending is not fictional, however, but quite real. Real and terrifying.

Okay, it's not terrifying, I was only kidding.

Circuit-bending is an art form combining elements of construction, electronics, hacking and sound creation. The circuit-bending artist works in the medium of audio with a palate made from the creatively modified ("bent") audio circuits of ordinary battery-powered consumer electronics.

These hacked circuits produce totally unique sound structures, the result of the mutations induced in it by the bender. Streams of data are slowed or compressed or corrupted, mixed with other signals or even fed back into themselves. Audio signals are substituted for data signals or overdriven or routed through the 'wrong' subsystems.

While audio circuit hacking is a descendant of ancient art of synth making and modifying, those practicing it in the realm of consumer electronics generally credit Rheed Ghazala as a founding father in the field, if not the founder.

Personally, I began mutilating portable electronic keyboards and other musical gadgets in the late 80's without any knowledge of "circuit-bending" per se. I made some recordings but never saw the larger potential of it. My experiments invariably resulted in the death of the device - I treated it as a destructive form of noisemaking self-expression. Would you believe that not once did I ever consider mounting permanent controls and re-assembling them for permanent use?

I rediscovered circuit bending a couple of years ago on eBay when I happened-across a bent Casio SK-1 for sale by the talented Tablebeast. To find the likes of Dave Wright, Mike Walters and Waterhead was to find a tribe of my own kind, but a tribe greatly advanced in their science.

I've since bent dozens of toys, keyboards and gadgets and still have a blast every time I un-engineer some hapless victim from my weekly thrift store expeditions. Each piece is totally unique and I make extensive use of them in my various audio experiments.

Evidence: Actual Crime Scene Recordings

L.E.D. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8]
Bloody Mary [coming soon]
Little Bugger [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]
Trepanation Baby [coming soon]
Brittany's Hell [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]
Dizzyphone [coming soon]
Big Vic [coming soon]
Stovetop Abortion [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]
My Crow Jam Her [coming soon]
King of Komedy [coming soon]

System of Chaos [my dissertation on bending technique, coming soon]

Secret Guide to the Global Circuit-Bending Conspiracy

Personalities
Rheed Ghazala: Godfather of Circuit Bending?
Tablebeast: Purveyor of the finely twisted
Dave Wright: Toy purgatory realized
Mike Walters: Mystery circuits
Waterhead: Very noisy! Yay!

Enablers
Datamath has a great article and many of lovely "Incantors"
Benders Yahoo group: Join today, I command thee.
Rubber Monkey Puppet Company: Not just for rubber monkey puppets anymore!
Oscillateur is overheating with bending info

Suppliers
Mouser has everything you need except toys and inspiration. A godsend.
All Electronics, famed Los Angeles supplier, has a full service website.
You'll soon be interested in the many circuits found here and here.
Ebay can serve as a proxy Salvation Army - it's worth a check now and then.