This is a circuit bent Texas instruments Speak and Math.  You may remember them…  They came out in the 80’s and were a toy that taught children basic math skills.

Beautiful packaging

These and the other Texas Instruments Speaks are probably the most popular of all circuit bending projects.  They are really quite simple and produce many different results.  If you want to go simple you can add just a couple bends to them, but you can also keep going as elaborate as you’d like.  There are probably limit less combination of bends and tweaks in here.  I’ve bent a few of these and each one I do gets a little more complicated and involved.  This is the latest one I’ve done and is now titled the Freak and Math.  This one took me around 5 days to bend and a couple more days to paint and add the control panel.

This version contains several bends.  There a main pitch bend with activation switch, 2 distortion effects, A loop bend with both switch and momentary button, a “beat repeat” which basically grabs a short segments and keeps repeating it, with a switch and momentary button to activate it.

The guts prior to bending

There’s a glitch button which makes it go into a freak out mode and continually spit out random words, numbers, blips, bloops and tones…. and also crashes the entire thing on occasion.  There is also two tone generators the add a constant tone to the currently playing sounds.  Each one has it’s own volume control.

Adding the box to house the new controls

There’s 2 body contacts that effect the pitch and also trigger glitches.  I’ve also added a small switch to alternate between the internal speaker and the 1/4 jack output. And there’s also the necessary reset button which cuts the power and lets you start again when it crashes.