Last weekend I attended a workshop called Vodoo Toys which was meant as an introduction to circuit bending. According to Wikipedia on Circuit bending, it’s

the creative short-circuiting of electronic devices such as low voltage, battery-powered guitar effects, children's toys and small digital synthesizers to create new musical or visual instruments and sound generators.

(Wikipedia’s circuit bending article was last modified on 20 February 2010 at 13:33 when I wrote this.)

Our tutor Stan Pete uses bent toys in live concerts and taught us how to elicit weird noises from electronic children’s toys ourselves. I myself don’t want to do live alien music, but I’m always trying to find new and intresting ingredients for animation. And because sound is as much important as the visuals, I thought it would be great to learn how to trigger weird melodies and sound effects like these.
The pictures below will give you some insights:

The workflow is always similar: open your toy or device, find connections evoking sounds, soldering them together and then do some case modelling.

I just did simple modifications since I’m a kind of newbie to electronic arts. I added

• a potentiometer to pitch the existing sounds
  
• body contacts to change the pitch in a different way
  
• an audio jacket socket for an easy use in a sound recording studio.
  
  

This is what my voodoo toy can do (approx. 11MB):

Of course you could do far more complex circuit bending if you’d have more complex devices than I have here... But for a quick start it was a nice result I think...

This is what others do with their bent toys:

If you want to read more about circuit bending, follow these links:

• anti-theory.com is launched by Reed Ghazala who is the inventor of circuit bending. This website is the main reference for most of the available information of circuit bending.
  
• The German newspaper [taz.de] has an interview with Reed Ghazala about his work. He seems to be an outstanding person and artist. Perhaps you could read it with the google translator if you don’t speak German (well).
  

Important note:

Please be careful if you want to try it yourself. You’re dealing with electricity here and this may cause serious injuries. Circuit benders normally only use battery driven devices since they only have low voltage connections.