Foreword
TL;DR: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
Perhaps one of the greatest things about electronic music is how it
changes the way that we listen to the world. The distinction between mu-
sic and noise becomes blurry and often disappears altogether. This was
my experience at least, and it quickly allowed me to find music every-
where around me. Drumbeats from the dishwasher, drones from the A/C
unit - there were few sounds that could not be placed in a music context.
Another unintended consequence was that the delineation between
functioning and non-functioning audio equipment became unimportant.
Sometimes I preferred when my CDs were scratched, my cell phone was
slightly too far from a Bluetooth speaker, or when a children’s toy was
running out of battery. Composer Kim Cascone summarizes this phenom-
ena in his essay, The Aesthetics of Failure, “The technique of exposing
the minutiae of DSP errors and artifacts for their own sonic value has
helped further blur the boundaries of what is to be considered music, but
it has also forced us to examine our preconceptions of failure and detri-
tus more carefully.”
And what group has better harnessed this new aesthetic of failure than
circuit benders? Armed with solder, jumper wires, and serendipity, these
people hunt for the most effective way to make audio devices misbe-
have.
As a longtime fan of circuit bending, I’ve always wanted to bring that
sense of discovery to the digital realm. What if we had digital “bend
points”, that were attached to knobs and switches, affecting how DSP
was rendered, all under voltage control? This was the inspiration for
Data Bender.
I hope you have as much fun breaking it as we did.
Happy patching,
Andrew Ikenberry
Founder & CEO
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