what is circuit bending?

circuit bending is opening up a cheap electronic toy, keyboard or drum machine and rewiring it by hand. you short points on its circuit board, slow down its clock, starve its battery and touch its insides, until it makes sounds it was never built to make.

BENDO is a toy like that, bent inside your computer. put any sound through it and bend it.

one bent toy.

every knob bends the same toy: its clock, its battery, its memory and its chips. so the bends set each other off.

the screen is the toy’s circuit board. every knob and key is a part on it, so you watch each bend happen. the backlight runs off the battery and dims as it dies.

clock. battery. address. data.

CLOCK

speeds the toy up or slows it down. pitch moves, time stays. turn LOCK off and they move together.

BATTERY

drains the battery. the sound sags, browns out and reboots as it dies.

ADDRESS

crosses the address lines, so the toy reads its memory out of order.

DATA

shorts the data lines and corrupts the bits in every sample.

loop. feedback. logic. mix.

LOOP

the toy gets stuck and stutters. turn it up and it sticks more often, in shorter loops.

FEEDBACK

wires the output back into the input, all the way to howling.

LOGIC

logic chips chop the sound into gates and add their own square-wave buzz.

MIX

dry to bent.

echo. rhythm. speech. mod all.

ECHO

an echo and reverb in the toy’s own memory. it follows the clock, and at the top it runs away.

RHYTHM

cuts the last bar into 16 slices and plays them back in a new pattern, locked to your host’s tempo.

SPEECH

turns whatever you feed it into talking-toy speech.

MOD ALL

corrupts the toy’s settings. the knobs you’ve turned jump to values you didn’t set, and stay there until you move them or hit RESET.

the keys.

RESET

resets the toy. memory stays.

WIPE

cuts the power. memory wiped, cold boot.

TOUCH

hold it and your finger is on the circuit. it wobbles, howls and retunes.

GLITCH

hold it to freeze what’s playing into a loop.

CRASH

lets the toy crash. it freezes, locks up or reboots on its own.

LINK

on, the bends share one circuit: a dying battery drags the clock down and faults set each other off. off, each bend acts alone.

RAW

on, raw seams and clock grit. off, smoothed.

REC

records through the toy’s clock. record at a slow clock and it plays back high and crunchy.

LOCK

on, pitch moves and time stays. off, they move together, like tape.

BURN

hold it to burn the bends into memory, so they stay after you let go.

KEYS

your hits press the toy’s keys and fire RHYTHM slices.

BYPASS

out of circuit. the panel greys and the screen goes dark.

double-press TOUCH or GLITCH to keep them on. hold CRASH, LINK or RAW to flip them for as long as you hold.

the possibilities are limitless.

83 programs. save your own, and find them all under PRESETS.