Speak & Spell
A much-loved and ubiquitous toy from the 1970s and 80s,
Texas Instruments Speak & Spell has found a new lease of life in electronica in
the last few years. People discovered that if you tinker with its circuits and
voice chips, glitching, looping, and other interesting effects can be achieved. ‘Circuit
Bending’, as this is known, is said to have begun in the late 1960s, and its
invention is attributed to one Reed Ghazala, after a fortuitous accident with a
toy amplifier.
Today Circuit Bending has reached the levels of an Art-form,
with its leading practitioners going ever further with increasingly unlikely
toys and devices, in search of sonic chaos. In addition to toys, Digital
musical instruments such as synths and drum machines make excellent circuit
bending subjects for musicians, as a visit to
Circuitbenders.co.uk website shows.
The SC
Speak & Spell was created by
Andy Wheddon, a keen bender from Brighton, UK. It has various trigger and
loop controls, as well as a pitch control knob and the all-important jack-output.
In use, the results of a circuit bent S&S are far from predictable. The best
technique tends to be to let the machine go into a random pattern of words and
glitches which can then be looped or manipulated, albeit barely, with the modified
controls.
Requires a full version of Kontakt - run in demo mode in Kontakt
Player.
DOWNLOAD (Win, Mac,
Kontakt EXS24 + Live!)