Sometimes you open up a toy or a keyboard and the great sounds come instantly cascading out, electrons dancing through your speakers, and joy unto the world. Other times, it ain’t so easy. I spent a long time on this bad boy before I could even start to reckon its true potential. But it has turned out to be one of my favorite bends.
The Vtech Little Talking Scholar is a delightful laptop looking toy that plays matching, music, and number games that are changed by inserting different cards into the “monitor”
There are basically four modes in the final bent version: music, numbers, glitch, and oscillator.
Music mode produces various patterns of twinkling melodies or streams of repeating notes. You can switch among a few different patterns or pitches. If you have one of the “play a song” cards in, you can use the rainbow keyboard to play the notes.
Number mode elicits streams of numbers 1-7, or if you have the note repeat switch on, it repeats each number over and over. Also, with the “song” card, you can use the keyboard to play the numbers individually.
Glitch mode produces repeating snippets of glitchy sounds like you get with a speak and spell, or talking whiz kid.
And the oscillator mode produces a loud tone that you can modulate to get all sorts of rhythmic beeping using the knobs.
There are two body contacts. The first lowers the pitch slightly. The second is more unpredictable, when you touch it along with the first contact it either really slows the pitch, or glitches off into random mayhem, or even just stops the sound (useful as a tremolo)
I installed three knobs which work in all modes. It’s a little hard to describe what they do especially when they start interacting. The first one sort of chops and screws the sounds, ultimately leading to a rhythmic rearticulation punctuated by pops and clicks.
The second knob adds a low tone that eventually washes out the sounds. The last knob starts by seeming to quell the sounds of the other knobs, but then rises up with a strong oscillating tone.
Using combinations of the three knobs when the notes or numbers are looping gives very interesting “drum” patterns with intermittent beeping and squelching. One of my favorite circuit bending tricks is to have knobs that seem to counteract each other, but then when you find the sweet spot between them it opens up a whole new level of sounds.
Add a hot “snakeskin” paint job, and you’ve got one hell of a machine!
Glitch mode:
Music mode:
Number mode:
Oscillator mode:
AWESOME!
June 7th, 2009 at 2:22 pm
Nice work. How much to do mine up like that?