About a month ago I was listening to NPR on the way to school when I was jet-propelled into my childhood by a piece about circuit bending with Speak and Spells, Casio keyboards, and other useless consumer electronics. While the circuit bending was cool (I love learning about people's obsessions and eccentricities - why not wile away the hours cracking open the backs of dead and gone technology in order to make rude noises), the sounds of the Speak and Spell stopped me dead in my tracks. I was instantly transported to a day in the third grade when I was sitting on the couch after school in our blue and brown rustic modern family room testing my spelling skills with the orange and blue machine. My mother had a friend over and while they were talking at the kitchen table not ten feet away the obnoxious computer-generated voice of my Speak and Spell incoherently announced each new spelling challenge. This must have been annoying. While I may not have understood it then, today I am all too familiar with the experience of trying to carry on a rational, adult conversation amidst the chaos of children's electronics. With great patience, my mother very gently suggested that I take my toy into my bedroom where I continued my willing participation in a spelling test conducted by, what sounded like, a elementary school Reading teacher possessed by R2D2. In the days before personal computers we were all thrilled by the seductive glare of fluorescent display screens and incomprehensible computer-generated voices. How green we were.For those of you too young to remember, the Speak and Spell was a primitive computer toy created by Texas Instruments in the late 1970s that played word and spelling games. Largely a failure either as a toy or an educational tool , the Speak and Spell serves as another example (I collect these!) of how consumer electronics take an otherwise cheap, effective, and largely boring task and fancies it up in order to lure a credulous public. Without the technology, the Speak and Spell was just a 99 cent spelling workbook that any child worth her or his salt would have "lost" the moment their well meaning parent brought it home.
Want to transform your consumer electronics into something more interesting? Here are some links to show you the way:
NPR: The Joys of Circuit-Bending
Online Speak and Spell simulator
Reed Ghazala's Art of Circuit Bending
