Music thing: Speak & Spell
Each week, Tom Whitwell of Music Thing highlights the best of the new music gear that's coming out, as well as noteworthy vintage equipment. Last Saturday it was the the Triadex Muse. This week, he gives us a little history of the Speak and Spell, and its many strange, hacked incarnations:
What a long, strange life it's had. The Speak and Spell was born in 1978, and 26 years later it's mutant offspring are still creaking to life. This week, Censtron (the people who made the circuit-bent iPod a few weeks back) released the Ortho-S!te, which is the guts of a Speak and Math in a big metal box covered in industrial-grade knobs to tweak the circuits (plus a very bright blue light and a fan to blow all the heat out). Meanwhile, Roil Noise, a Kansas City based art collective just released a virtual circuit-bend Speak and Spell that sounds incredible.
Nobody saw the Speak and Spell coming. Texas Instruments had been a military research company during World War 2, and by 1965 they were designing laser-guided bombs and missiles. But military spending fell in the 1970s, so TI conquered the pocket calculator market. By 1977 were looking for something new.
They?d had some success with the incredibly dorky Little Professor, and Paul Breedlove, one of the designers behind it came up with the idea of an speaking spelling teacher. But speaking computers were huge and cost thousands of dollars, and Paul?s bosses laughed at him, giving his team just three months and $25,000 to invent a speaking computer on a single chip. Through some kind of black magic, they pulled it off, and the Speak and Spell was launched at Summer CES in 1978. When ET used one to phone home in 1982, it was already a classic. Two million were sold around the world.
Electronic toys moved on, and Speak and Spells ended up forgotten at the back of cupboards. Then in 1992, a fantastically pretentious artist called Reed Ghazala started playing with the circuits in electronic toys to make weird noises. He turns Speak and Spells into Incantors, and has sold instruments to people like Peter Gabriel, Tom Waits and Blur. Because it?s cheap, easy, and kind of cool, circuit bending has quietly become massive?there are always a dozen or so weird-looking bent instruments on eBay. So, if you?ve got a Speak and Spell and don?t want to sell it for up to $70 to a wannabe bender, there are great beginners guides to Speak and Spell bending here and here.
