ISO Audio Greeting Cards from the Past...

My love of circuit bending started way back around 2006 when I saw my first bent Speak and Spell. From that point on, I was buying junk toys at thrift shops and dollar stores to experiment with at home.

Some of my favorite devices to bend were the circuit boards inside of audio greeting cards.

I would remove the sound chips and rehouse them in various project enclosures. Each one had various controls based on what the circuit allowed for.

Fun, noisy shit ensued.

I had a small collection of these "Noise Boxes" that have been lost to time. No idea where they wound up.

On these circuits were typically two or three "through hole" type resistors that I could replace fairly easily with various potentiometers and buttons.

But as these types of greeting cards became more popular, "surface mount" type resistors became easier and cheaper to manufacture.

Unfortunately, without much more precise tools, it's next to impossible to get clean connections on a circuit board that uses these resistors, so my days of making these noise-boxes was over.

Here is the only video and audio I saved from three of my many Noise Boxes. These videos are from 2007, filmed on a small Canon Cool-Pix or something like that. The audio was recorded direct from the chip (I wired an output where the speaker had been) and added back in post.

Below, I've uploaded the three audio files from this video. Feel free to do with them as you wish.

Have fun!

If you or someone you know happens to have access to old, unused stock of these 2006-2009 era cards (in a storage spot, attic, warehouse...) let me know! I'd love to make a ton more of these noise boxes.