 I am playing with you, buddy. Yeah! That was good. That was a big bird. And there we go. That is the beginnings of circuit bending. Futuristic doesn't have to mean new. It can also mean using old tech in a way that hasn't been done before. We're here in the seaside town of Margay to visit Sam Battle. Sam is also known as Look Mum No Computer. He's a musician and circuit bender who breaks apart old toys and synths to create his own instruments. Some of his creations include a musical flamethrower and a Furby organ. He's invited me into his studio so I can check out some of his creations for myself and so we can break open a toy and circuit bend it together. My name's Sam and I do a project called Look Mum No Computer, which is basically like repurposing things and making silly inventions that are loosely based around music. And I do some circuit bending and things. What is circuit bending? Circuit bending is basically taking like machines and toys and cheap things from the past or even nowadays and just making them do things that they're not intended to do. Usually, let's say in the 70s somebody's got a toy in their attic, a speaking spell, like those orange and yellow toys. Somebody's like, I wonder what it's like inside there. They pull it apart, they see all these circuit bits, lick their fingers because it's only got two batteries, you're not going to electrocute yourself. No, I'm joking. And then you find that it makes different sounds or you can change the pitch if you touch the ground with one finger and a certain bit of the chip goes like, oh, it's like a little bit of a chip. And then it goes like, oh, oh, and you're making it do unintended things. And it's maybe it began probably as something that was fun. And then it quickly evolved into something like musicians used to make new sounds. At its height, circuit bending spans several musical genres, with artists like Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, Beck and Danny Elfman all using circuit bent instruments in performances. While it's not as popular anymore, there's still something about Sam's creations that's just really cool. They're massive and insane. Forty four circuit bent Furbys, all circuit bent in sequence around the back. If you look really carefully behind it, you'll see behind them, they've got like, you can see all the wires and stuff. Have a little peek in there. They make a lot of noise. They are noisy. Now you miss it. Now you miss the sound. I do kind of miss the sound. How long did it take you to build this thing? I built this in about two weeks of not sleeping. However, I've been planning it for seven years. And then it took me about a year to find all of the Furbys. This is like Gordon Ramsay, but Furbys. So what we've got to do is we've got to get it ready by removing its protective cable tie. Then you've got to be a bit forceful. So there we go. Oh, wow. Okay. I would be too. Now what you've got to do is you get that and have a fiddle. There's no right or wrong. And there we go. Yay. And what you do is you find something like that. And then you put some sort of thing that would make this permanent or not. So you snip that and you put a switch on it. So you can choose those points. So you can have control over it making that noise. Now you just see what it does. Sit back and enjoy. That's so cool. I mean, I've always, I've circuit bent Furbys a lot from when I started them because they were quite cheap for how advanced they were in what they did. Apparently ever since they came out, there was a people that wanted to fiddle with them and see what's inside them. Circuit bending really was an exploitation of this little window of time when the scale and complexity of electronics was just right. You know, it was it was complex enough to do wild stuff, but simple enough that a little hack could make it, you know, malfunction in cool ways. That's Peter Edwards, who founded Casper Electronics. He's a circuit bending expert who's built custom instruments for bands. The consumer electronics we have in our lives have evolved in a way that's completely oblivious to these hacking practices and have moved away from hackability. I was teaching circuit bending workshops for about 10 years and then I stopped because eventually no one in the workshop could hack anything. There was nothing to bend because the circuits just weren't bendable anymore. So, yeah, is there a future for circuit bending? I think from the perspective of modifying kids toys, I think no, not really. But from the perspective of people approaching, you know, consumer products and electronics with an adventurous spirit and finding new ways to use them, like, absolutely. And Sam is one of these people who is pushing the medium forward and finding new ways to make music through hacking electronics. It's like a Daft Punk fight. Yeah. Hit that, hit that. Every, every synth bike needs an air horn. This one's even got a head. It's got a face. Look, every synthesizer needs a face. His name's Cosmo or her, I don't know. Right now we're going to control it with this solar panel. So I'm going to patch in a solar panel into the parameter that controls the mouth. So I'm going to get the solar panel. Are you ready? Hey, how you do there man? I'm okay. How are you? Hey, you're so funny. So to be fair with circuit bending, it's not nearly as popular as it used to be. There aren't a lot of people that do it as much anymore. But you are over here doing the absolute most that you could possibly do with circuit bending and doing these gigantic projects. Yeah, yeah, I feel it's involved a bit. The kind of people that did circuit bending are into building like modular synths now and stuff like that. The problem with modern toys is they're not as hackable as the old ones. However, you can still hack them, but they require a different way to do it. And it's not usually as obvious. But I love it. And I just I'm trying to take it to different levels. And like right now, I'm trying to take existing projects that I've had in my head and just make them larger. But why, when everything has evolved so that you can do it on a laptop and there are digital replications of most hardware instruments that are out there, why put in all of the effort and time and money into creating things like this? That is so tough. I mean, the only answer I have is why not, I guess. I'm just deeply curious. Do you make music at all digitally at this point or are you really committed to just using hardware? I think it would be crazy to just do hardware. I mean, like computers are very enabling for people. I do a lot of work with other artists and I tend to be stuck in front of a computer for that stuff anyway. Shot myself in the foot with the name. Like, look, I'm no computer. I can't really use a computer. But at the same time, whatever. I make the rules. I made the rules for my projects so you can't tell me if I can use a computer or not because I made the name. Tech in music runs the gamut from futuristic technologies like AI on one hand to circuit bending old electronics on the other. Circuit bending has fallen out of style a little bit, but that doesn't mean that it hasn't continued to evolve and progress. Creativity doesn't require new technology, but rather a new way of looking at the things that you already have. This video is presented by Aloft Hotels, different by design. If you enjoyed this, please subscribe to our YouTube channel.