Circuit Bent Speak & Spell: The FreakenSpeak

The 70's electronic toy produced by Texas Instruments the Speak & Spell was an educational toy that users typed words on a keyboard and were displayed on a small digital led screen and were read back by the machine's speech synthesizer. Nowadays the Speak & Spell is a circuit bent classic favorite and one of the more popular tricked out electronic toys to be had on eBay and elsewhere. The main tricksters for the Freakenspeak are the two bend buttons, two more for looping, and, a photocell for hand motion control, as well as functioning as a straight sort of tone generator or as a regular Speak & Spell. A full circuit bent unit is sometimes available from Punksynth Store at http://www.punksynth.com/ If you feel deprived from not being around in the late 1970's or want to play with a Speak & Spell check out the virtual Speak & Spell online at http://www.speaknspell.co.uk...

The original Speak & Spell in it's original state. The former we agree much more enticing.

Further Freakin:

# high/low pitch switch - next to the photo cell switch
# swirly ball knob - bottom left
# brass ball body contact - the more of your hands that touch it, the lower the pitch
# holographic label - also lowers the pitch the more contact you have with it