Spring Break
Circuit-benders generate music from cast-off devices
Ataris, Commodores, resurrected by programmer as an electronic backup band
By: Doug Bedell
Issue date: 5/27/04 Section: News
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Ask Dallas musician Paul Slocum to name his favorite instrument, and he'll probably answer, "My 1985 Epson dot matrix printer."
The 29-year-old erstwhile computer programmer takes vintage electronics and modifies their programming to produce unusual sounds that he weaves into original music.
Together with his girlfriend, Lauren Gray, Slocum is gathering notice as Tree Wave (www.treewave.com). All performances are produced with scavenged and "modded" electronic components _ a 1977 Atari 2600 game console, 1986 portable 286 PC, a 1983 Commodore 64 computer and the printer.
Gray blends her lilting, ethereal voice into the bass, drum and melody lines programmed into the PC and Commodore by Slocum. The Atari produces colorful, dancing video collages that are projected onto club walls or portable televisions. In the background, the Epson printer head creates buzzing, guitarlike riffs as it prints out images.
In its broadest sense, the printer may be considered part of an unusual niche in modern electronic music called "circuit-bending." Participants of varying technical abilities take old battery-powered devices -- Speak & Spell toys, GameBoys, Furby dolls (see hackfurby.com), Coleco Talking Teachers -- crack them open and experiment with ways their circuitry can produce sounds.
At the low-tech end, circuit-benders bridge contact points or short out a gadget's mainboard, then figure out ways to pipe the resulting sounds through amplifiers.
"The most common thing is to put wires where they're not supposed to be and put switches between them," Slocum says. "Or you tap into the electronics and create a little audio-out, something like that. A lot of times people who do that stuff are just playing around until they find something interesting.
"The nice thing about it is that you don't have to have any technical expertise, and it's kind of fun, I guess. But the potential for making music with it is limited."
Circuit-benders from across the globe congregate in online discussion groups to share information on sounds they've created out of all sorts of gizmos.
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