the blubber box

The blubber box started out originally as a voice changing megaphone toy that had 3 settings: Robot, Alien, and Ghost. It sounded amazing. My intention, from the beginning, was to rehouse the circuit and add power LED with input and ouput jacks with volume control.

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Unfortunately, somewhere along the way while rehousing the circuit, I must have killed something. The microphone became unresponsive and the thing just started making its own babble without any input. I did some pretty lengthy troubleshooting with no real success. I can say with confidence, though, that this circuit can take a lot of abuse...I (intentionally) hooked wires (including power/ground) in every possible configuration trying to get things back to normal. At least it never got worse.

Instead of just pitching it, I decided to rehouse it anyway and just use the babbling. The name came from the fact that this thing blubbers like a child or a madman.

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I rehoused the circuit in a cheapo plastic Radio Shack enclosure and added power LED, output jack, power jack, and batt/ext toggle switch. Because I already had screws coming through the plastic (to hold the speaker in place on the inside), I decided to add a couple of human contact points. The effect isn't amazing, but at least it's an effect that wasn't there before. The volume control only effects the line-out level, it has no effect on the internal speaker. The 1/8" line-out jack had a built in switch, so when a cable is inserted the speaker is immediately disabled.

The box is very shoddy, low tek, quick and cheap construction. No paint, no graphics (yet?), just some drimmel holes and sharpie to mark a few of the controls. The box is real noisy. Ranges are from Cylon to Merzbow (extreme harsh electronics noise).

Samples

You probably don't even want to hear the following sounds. The sound is much too abrasive for most tastes. I promise. Both were recorded in one take, no added effects other than amplitude tweaking: