In struggling with this difference I've developed language to help people understand the technical process as well as the tenets of the art movement that has resulted (perhaps the first electronic art or art-object movement). This nomenclature was introduced, I felt, as a matter of necessity for my article series introducing my original discovery process to the readers of Bart Hopkin's Experimental Musical Instruments magazine. It was in 1992, in EMI, that I first published my term "circuit-bending".

Many new terms were to follow such as "living instrument", "the threshold of invention", "clear illogic", "BEAsape" and "immediate canvas", along with various instrument names now used to define the movement's emergence.

"Immediate canvas" is very important. Until now the presumed hurdles of electronic design have instilled a sense of apprehension in lay persons. Even without electrocuting one's self, a slow and tedious entry is expected within a stack of daunting, equation-bound texts. Circuit-bending changes all this as it transforms the circuit into a friendly and "immediate" canvas: like the painter's canvas, immediately there for anyone at all with brush in hand. Just walk up to it and paint.

One of the reasons the modern painter's canvas is immediate is because painters, today, rarely wildcraft their pigments. Stretch a canvas (if that!), squeeze tube, paint. That's pretty immediate.

Similarly, a parallel can be seen in circuit-bending's circuit board as canvas and ready-made pigments in the form of the traveling wire mentioned above. Just as personal understanding of the science of pigment is not as needed by painters today as it once was, upon circuit-bending's immediate canvas a similar thing now occurs: the science of the electron is no longer needed to advance the creative moment. Finally, with electronics, just walk up to it and paint.

The painting process here, circuit-bending's chance approach, is an act of "clear illogic". As opposed to fuzzy logic, a seeking of norm within chaos, clear illogic seeks chaos within the norm. It is through this chaos, a powerful creative force, that the instruments are allowed to behave beyond the theoretical intentions (and limitations) of the designer.

Let's place this concept on more familiar ground. Earthlings "musicalize" things. An instrument will be made from a coconut washed-up on the shore, eventually. The coconut could become the ball of a rattle (idiophone), or halved, the shell of a drum (membranophone). A hole could be poked and blown over (aerophone). The coconut might be used as a resonator for a stringed instrument (chordophone). It depends on how you see the coconut.

Our society's electronic discards, like coconuts fallen to the sea, collect at the high-tide lines of garage sales and flea markets, second-hand shops and garbage bins. Circuit-bending sees these circuits as the island native saw the coconut. These circuits are coconuts of our island. Adapt the coconut, adapt the circuit. Circuit-bending, seen as art, was inevitable.

I say inevitable due to a principle I call "the threshold of invention." This threshold exists as we encounter our leading edge of time. Because the modern moment occurs before us as though on a stage, and we, the audience, witness, there will be the possibility of a common reaction. Often this reaction is seen as a wave of invention. With discarded circuits on the stage and artists as audience the threshold of invention suggests that what I discovered back in 1960's was due.

Conceptually, a "living instrument" is somewhat more difficult. You and I are living instruments. We accept that our voice will change, become deeper over time, quieter in the end, and will some day fail. We accept that our friends and lovers will change as they age. However, can we accept this in our musical instruments?

The why and why not of this issue could fill pages with ink in excess and halls with people in argument. Let me just say that not all circuit-bent instruments are "living instruments." That is, instruments that are slowly burning themselves out faster than usual due to the bending process. The great majority of my own bent instruments are not living instruments (at least in this regard; it can easily be argued that all the instruments we know, acoustic and electronic, are living instruments). And none that I routinely offer to the public are.
 

However, some bent instruments do age and sound different as time passes, as they consume their accelerated timeline. The instrument grows a little older, moves a little closer to early demise, every time you turn it on. Don't play it to save it? Play it to let it sing? Not your father's Farfisa, for sure.

Body-contacting was one of the very first things I found possible within the bending process. From the start I had the feeling that I was transformed in some way by body-contacting an instrument, myself becoming a part of the circuitry as surely as any capacitor soldered in place. I felt that a new, albeit temporary, creature was created when a musician played a body-contact instrument - in this moment when the electricity of both bodies intertwine, the same essential electricity that if denied would cause each body to die. I was changed and the circuit was changed, and I had trouble deciding where each of us began and ended. I simply concluded we were something new, and we were one.

Therefore, with the rush to discover and name new species so pressing in the circles of biology, cautiously I introduce the BEAsape (pronounced "be a", as in "be a sport"; "sape", rhymes with grape).
 

The Species Device, a BEAsape instrument.

BEAsape, of course, is an acronym: BioElectronicAudiosapian. Instrument/animal, mutant or hybrid, both musically and zoologically the BEAsape pushes boundaries and is interesting to discuss

During my 35 years of experiment and design I've created countless circuit-bent instruments. A few of these instruments are now well-known within the circuit-bending movement.

Best known is the circuit-bent Speak & Spell. Originally a spelling game, this series of human voice synthesizers was manufactured by Texas Instruments decades ago. While I immediately circuit-bent the first model released to the public,

Modern Incantor.

Through the standard techniques of circuit-bending I discovered six systems I routinely build into Incantors: looping, streaming, master pitch, body-contact vibrato, reset, and pilot lights for power and audio peak. Many more modifications are in my notes.

LOOPING

Musically, the most familiar territory on an Incantor is accessed through the looping system. Here, also, is where the bottomless pit is found, filled with more sound-forms than you'll ever have time to hear.

An Incantor looping system actually interfaces as two systems. The first initiates a sound loop when a push-button switch is pressed. Each time the button is pressed a new loop is set. In this way you can audition loops to find one you want to work with. Throwing a nearby toggle switch then locks this loop into play. The second part of the system is optical: loops are incremented forward into new forms as a hand is waved over the instrument.

In practice, the player starts the Incantor which, through the voice synthesis method of linear predictive coding, ties allophones together and begins to speak, somewhat fluently, in a human language. If, in mid-word, the looping function is actuated, instead of the sustained noise of vowel or consonant you might expect you suddenly find yourself listening to a sequence of varied sounds. These might be segments of speech, abstract unrecognizable sound, or both. They might be overtly musical, almost musical, or not musical at all - just faint hissing, perhaps, that rises in volume once in a while.

A full range of dynamics might evolve within a single loop ...tiny sounds, great sounds - surprising sounds of nameless instruments. If you push the button again you have a new loop, a completely new loop perhaps, and so on, forever.

STREAMING

The streaming system consists of three switches, each capable of rearranging the digital speech programs in various ways. Instead of looping, these switches transform the audio into endless streams of aleatoric music.

PITCH

Any output can be tuned with the pitch dial over a very wide range, all the way down to deep sub-harmonics.

BODY CONTACTS

Similarly, the body contacts affect pitch though not to so great a degree. Touching the contacts decreases pitch only a little, but just right for real-time vibrato.

After having worked with numerous random and pseudo-random machines, written code and bent code and built complex, processor-controlled synthesizers to explore chance in music, I cannot deny the Incantor its simple elegance of interface and certainly not its stupendous, in fact fathomless, output. As chance music box the Incantor is a truly remarkable machine.
 

Briefly, I should touch on a few more key instruments.


 

The Trigon Incantor, another human voice synthesizer, increases the chance interface via the steel-balls: three large steel balls are rolled around on the pressure-sensitive stage to actuate the aleatoric responses.

Morpheum.

Morpheums are deep BEAsape instruments combining animal cries with mechanical sounds, drastically pitch-shifted by means of the body-contacts: new voices result.

Aleatrons are circuit-bent keyboards (an entire book could be written on the fantastic output of circuit-bent digital keyboards; the new response, tonal as well as aleatoric, can be mind-boggling).

Hands are waved in space over the Photon Clarinet's dual sensors, like a theremin. While one sensor smoothly sweeps the pitch, like a theremin, the other steps the pitch through arbitrary scales presenting a very unusual voice system.

The Vox Insecta is a complex insect voice synthesizer capable of reproducing, as well, choirs and orchestral textures. The Vox Insecta was used in its many modes on my threnody CD to musically set the tragedy of Hiroshima.

With the Video Octavox any video recording becomes the experimental music counterpart of the player piano roll: a program medium. Here the instrument's light sensors attach to the video screen activating a "string" section of violins, violas and cellos (filtered VCO's) as well as a built-in Photon Clarinet.

Despite the heterodoxy of these instruments, I prefer to not let bent-circuit musical composition become a thorny subject. I am satisfied with the realization that every sound, like every color, elicits an emotion. That is enough for me even when composing with aleatoric elements (though this subject is both fascinating and endless, being debated with me since I built my first instrument).

I suppose the greatest value I see in circuit-bending, beyond the new palette, is how the art encourages fresh musical thought. It is these two aspects, the art's sound and ideas, that have kept me at the bench and in the studio for decades.

Some artists gravitate to the art due to the anti-establishment aspects, a political stance setting themselves against the standard music industry (instrument manufacturers as well as music purveyors). While conscious of the political subterfuge such an art might engender, I, on the other hand, do not see this as either unusual or particularly important - it is how our machine works. Part again of the threshold of invention, an unstoppable force.

I should mention that in my exploration of "anti-theory" I do not abandon theory as many people presume. I only question it in the way that scientists always question prevailing concepts. I cannot think theory without anti-theory, a devil's advocate, alongside. Theory has been my friend for a very long time, true. But I've found it is not the only way to think, and clearly not the only way to create.

You will note I have refrained from dropping the names of colleagues. Rather than parallel and compare this art and its output to any known models, I, in teaching it as the entity that impressed me as a young artist, have chosen to model presentation similarly. I focus on the history of my original discovery process which was original in that, as noted, I was uninfluenced by outside teaching or example. I was too young, too isolated perhaps.

My aim, therefore, has been to welcome everyone by removing technical as well as academic hurdles as they were removed for me (14-year-olds rarely have college music labs to work in, classically the alternate and more usual birthplace of experimental music and instruments). However, for more specifics I will refer the reader to my 20-article series in EMI where I more closely detail the evolution of circuit-bending as well as its placement within the context and history of electronic and experimental music.

As to this odd art's influence, circuit-bending's instrumentarium is exploding world-wide. The internet will hit non-stop on various galleries and artists presenting their discoveries (when I launched my website in 2000 it was the only place online to see circuit-bent instruments; it was also the first online instructional site). Now hundreds of new instruments are being built, by chance, every day.

It is accepted that I have innumerable students. Millions I am told. The truth, however, is that they are not mine. They and I, in fact, have the same teacher - a mind-altering addictive art that reveals itself in examples of composition that, while too alien to recognize, aretoo musical to ignore.
 

Still, my course has not been smooth. At one low point in the late 1960's an audience tried its best to hospitalize me, my band, and destroy my first instrument. Undaunted, I continued to explore the art. I never feared for its place in the world. I was sure a space would evolve.

Transistors, now tribal, are chanting rhymes. A tempest of new song is swirling within these hidden camps. Circuit-benders are, in a sense, ethno-musicologists exploring villages ringing with electronic folk music, indigenous in this case to circuit and time rather than people and time. They feel as I have always felt and continue for the same reason: a sense that there is a rich new world of music at hand.

Standing next to my teacher in grade school, in trouble at her desk, was an incident that now reveals itself as a prophetic moment. Predictive in that I would continually find myself the "odd man out" in how I looked at things, trouble of one kind or another usually close at hand. Ironic in that following my own ideas and interests, while a hindrance in school, did bring its own reward in the end.

Mostly though, that moment in front of the class was keenly metaphoric in that my endless mazes of grade school were so like the maze of traces on the abandoned circuit boards I bend today. How like the two pennies dropped on the grade school drawing the two wire ends are, dropped onto the maze of circuitry to define start and finish! Further, how endless are the corridors in this new maze of hide-and-seek circuitry, in that nearly every audio circuit around us is an experimental musical instrument waiting to happen.
 

"This article is an expanded, early version of Ghazala's "The Folk Music of Chance Electronics, Circuit-Bending the Modern Coconut," that also appears in more concise form within "Music after David Tudor, Leonardo Music Journal Vol. 14., MIT Press."