notesdontmatter

Forum – Week 5 – Circuit Bending II:

All things forum seemed determined to bring me down this week. The voltage converter circuit didn’t work, the talking parrot delivered paltry results and my pursuits at home left me with nothing on Sunday evening.


That changed this morning when I decided to give the toy mobile another crack at hard wiring some bends. I quickly discovered that multiple levels of resistance and an easy on/off switching system were necessary to capture the low level signal. I dispensed with the 4.5 volts of internal batteries in favour of a 9-volt fed via three resistors (two pots and an LDR).


This still required a delicate touch, but the results came through when I discovered that fine-tuning the pots gave a lot of expressive control to the LDR. After so much disappointment it was rewarding to manipulate that annoying operator voice, creating some almost demonic speech fragments. It is currently a combination of hard wired and breadboard circuit connectivity, but this will be converted to a more robust model over the next week.

Click here to link to online folder containing this weeks audio example.


Reference:

Haines, Christian. “Forum – Week 5 – Circuit Bending II.” Workshop presented at the Department of Engineering, Intermediate Practical Laboratory, University of Adelaide, 23rd of August 2007.

Tomczak, Sebastian. “Forum – Week 5 – Circuit Bending II.” Workshop presented at the Department of Engineering, Intermediate Practical Laboratory, University of Adelaide, 23rd of August 2007.

posted by David J Dowling @ 10:32 AM