heh heh heh, hope i don't fry that golden blob looking for bends and become an emoticonoclast.
i discovered this method when i was tinkering with a no-name 2 part musical telephone toy that i'd purloined from the childrens toybox after hearing how nicely it detuned when the batteries were running down. It had a handset with a 2 button blob and a base with musical numeric keys, a few animal sounds and a jungle siren. The handset is a 2 sample 0v trigger blob, with just a clock speed resistor and piezo. Samples are a dtmf dialling string and ringing tone, both loop until break, with the ringtone having precedence. The base is slightly more complex, blob, 2 resistors, transistor and a small speaker with samples triggered by a keyboard matrix, one of the matrix rows being the +3v line.
i had both blobs wired up to the 2 AAs in the base as the button cell in the handset was shot. i'd found a few distortion and sample pausing bends connecting the transistor to the matrix columns when all the prodding and movement of pcbs caused the one of the wires to the handset's piezo to become disconnected, i touched this wire around with no joy so i started a sample playing on handset and tried again and found it triggered the samples from the base's +3v matrix row when touching matrix columns. i guess this works on +V triggerable blobs because the +V to push first blob's speaker cone forward is enough to trigger the second blob?, i measured with a meter and seemed to be getting 0-2.85Vpp on the first blobs output, with silence being a constant 0 similar to an unsigned sample.
So i added toggles on the handset's button points, pots on the clock resistors, and a rotary between handset's piezo and base's matrix columns / speaker, a very rewarding nights work!
Since then i've also made a blob-tangle from a talking dalek toy, winnie the pooh talking book, and another phone dial/ring blob (this one came from a plastic mobile phone toy on the front of one of the children's magazines - identical blob board, guess they must be pretty widespread). The dalek was a classic even before bending as it has just one +V button which cycles through an array of samples, and when you glitch through them at the right speed it clearly begins to swear. 1st syllable of sample 1, glitch, 1st of 2, glitch, 1st of 3, glitch, etc... == profanity; // hoho.
Another pseudo LFO can be had by voltage dropping an LM386 and using its output to trigger, i found that dropping to between 2.80v and 2.85v (just under the voltage it starts picking up AM and way under its nominal 4V minimum) causes it to start cutting in and out and producing tuneable pulse sweeps. Next time i have a blob session i'm going to try wiring a couple of blobs outputs through the inverting and non inverting inputs of the LM386 so once i stop the voltage drop it'll start amping those, at the moment it's just got a transistor+zener white noise generator going to one of its inputs. i've also got a simple opamp variable sinegen and sine->sawtooth that i might try bolting in somewhere, any ideas?