Category Archives: Circuit Bend

Binaural beats and Atari Punk Console followup

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Long-time reader of this blog may remember me having an idea of creating a binaural beat generator based on 2 APC. real all about it here http://www.larsby.com/johan/?p=67.

Well so, I made it. I was going to make a few APC’s anyway so I might as well test the idea.  I used http://www.electro-music.com/forum/phpbb-files/thumbs/t_apc555_129.gif so I could try and make a stripboard.

So yeah, the pot’s have a little bit of a glitch in them, kinda ruins the experience, and that is why I had to edit the video so hard.

Listen to it in headphones and tell me you don’t get dizzy.

Here’s a zipped wav-file in case youtube doesn’t do stereo properly. binauralbeatAPC.wav

If you want to make one yourself do 2 of the above APC, connect the pot’s to stereo versions of it. On of the cables between the pot’s add a new 10k pot between. Also if you don’t connect the batteries at the exact same time you will get strange phase’s. Very nice!

Idea for a new VST, a little helper for creating melodies.

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Yes yes yo.

I had  this idea when traveling to work. The train was super crowded and that got me thinking of circuit bending. A lot of the devices I’ve bent have a “press only one key to play a melody that you probably heard a gazillion times before”  that combined with me reading up on Arnold Schoenberg’s 12 tone matrix melody composer thing gave me a new idea! What if you could type in a couple of notes that you know are in a good scale, or fits your mood. Then press a key on your keyboard or similar to add play these in order. And if you make the VST output MIDI then you could connect it to any VSTi and have it play the sound’s of your liking. You could even record the output and edit it. I was thinking that this would be a nice little tool for creating melodies (which I suck at programming in) but editing or fiddling them out is much easier for me.

Perhaps I’ll do this and put it up on http://www.shuriken.se one of these days, it will mostly be UI work though, which I find a bit tedious to program in VST GUI.  Thought’s ideas suggestions are welcome.  Name suggestions also.

The HC-FA10 was a lie! (but might be a nice bent device)

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As many men my age the weight is starting to escalate beyond what is good for once health. To stop this and to be able to measure my progress in doing so. I bought what I thought was a resistive body-fat measure device. However upon first use at the coffee table together with a few colleagues it soon revealed itself that the little device has all the properties and apparent features of being a device that measures the fat in your body by sending electricity through it.  You enter data about yourself such as age, weight, sex and length, then you hold your thumbs on the metallic plates and a progress bar appears, after a while you get your bodyfat in %. So I tried to trick it after we checked our fattnes, me and my colleagues, by wetting my thumbs thus removing resistance. Same % as a result. Then the others tried it, same % as me (on my settings). But when shorting the path it did say error (almost half-clever) . You can let go as soon as the progressbar starts though.

I was fooled, thats the downside.

The upside is that the device has two body contacts, a battery compartment (for a standard CR battery),  a pretty decent screen and a speaker. So perhaps you could put something that makes noise inside it that uses body contacts to make the sound. That could be awesome, using it for what it was intended for isn’t.