Using STEIM’s CrackleBox

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I’ve just bought a CrackleBox from STEIM. It’s an inexpensive, nicely made circuit bent instrument, played by touching the silvery contact pads on the box surface. The pads connect to various points on a circuit board inside the box – touching the contacts short circuits various parts of the board, resulting in semi-predictable sounds being generated.

This is a first improvisation using the CrackleBox with my time stretching instrument. The sounds are electronic and tend to be intense, so this is quite a different piece from my work with flugel horn.

A bit of history…

The CrackleBox was created by Michel Waisvisz at STEIM in the 1970s, and is one of the earliest examples of a circuit-bent instrument.

The idea in circuit bending is to take an existing piece of (battery powered) consumer electronics, expose the circuit board, and touch various points on it until you get some kind of unintended sound. You gradually create a map of the most interesting points to touch, and then solder wires between those points and some kind of contact pads that you can touch with your fingers.

There’s a great article on circuit bending here, with a more pithy definition : “the creative short-circuiting of everyday electronic sound devices to make strange new instruments and art objects”

Here’s a link to the site of an interesting custom maker of electronic instruments – BugBrand.

An early pioneer of circuit bending is Reed Ghazala, whose excellent (and beautiful) site is well worth visiting. Not only does Reed make custom instruments, but he has a wealth of material on how to circuit bend your own instruments. If circuit bending interests you, his site is a good place to start. He also has a book available on Amazon: Circuitbending: Build Your Own Alien Instruments (ExtremeTech)

Also check out Handmade Electronic Music by Nicholas Collins, which is about all kinds of hardware hacking, not just circuit bending.  It’s a great book for beginners as you start off by creating very simple sound makers with basic tools like loudspeakers and batteries.There’s chapters on making contact mics, tape head instruments, circuit bending of various kinds, and building simple synthesiszer circuits. And along the way you learn how to solder, and avoid electrocuting yourself. You really don’t need to know anything about electronics to start making noise makers with this book.

(Note – both of the above links to Amazon are affiliate links)

Tagged as: circuit bending, CrackleBox, electroacoustic, electronic drone, experimental soundscape, Improvisation, Live Performance, time stretching