Tickle Me Twins
These pieces use the circuit housings from “Tickle Me Elmo” dolls. The housings are great to use as general sound project containers. Most of the supporting hardware you need for a lot of sound circuits is already there. You’ve got a speaker, a battery compartment and a large pushbutton. And there’s plenty of room inside for mounting extra hardware.
Tickle Me 1
I replaced the “elmo” circuit with a small sound circuit from a cheap beanbag toy (”silly slammers” I think). When this circuit is triggered, it makes a whistling and laughing sound. When the pitch is lowered, the sound breaks up into strange modulating tones.
Click here for an enlarged diagram of the controls.
Controls
- Pitch/ coarse tune thumb wheel
- Pitch/ fine tune vernier knob (a geared mechanism that turns the shaft of the potentiometer once for every eight turns of the knob).
- Pitch control touch sensors
- Power switch
- Volume
Technique for playing the Tickle Me pieces.
The loosely intended way to play this gadget is by holding it in your left hand with the speaker next to your mouth so the butt of the container is pressed against your cheek. Then you set a mic a few inches from your mouth. The cavity of your mouth acts as a filter for the sound coming out of the speaker. It’s the same premise as a talk box. The sounds made by this circuit work very well with this technique and you can effectively sculpt the sound with your mouth.
Tickle Me 2
This housing is a little different than the standard “tickle me” housing. It has all the same features but also has an additional pushbutton on the top of the housing. I replaced the “elmo” circuit with one from a “Babe the pig” plush toy. This circuit has an interesting glitch that creates distortion and strings of random words
and phrases.
Controls
- Pitch coarse tune (controlled by turning the converted button on the top of the housing)
- pitch fine tune slider
- Glitch button
- Power switch