I've been walking past this guy sitting on a shelf for a couple weeks, every time I do I think about how great it sounds--I've talked about this thing somewhere else so I apologize for being redundant if it was on this blog. The shell is from some 80's radio shack thing made to look like a Speak & Spell which didn't make any cool sounds and wasn't otherwise fun, so I just used it to house a dual oscillator circuit of some kind, probably based on one of the circuits from the Nicolas Collins book "Handmade Electronic Music." Two square oscillators, with pitch controlled either by potentiometer or LDR, with the light sensors underneath the 4 and 5 buttons off a toy phone.
The black rocker switch and the yellow pedal switch (the gas from a kids battery powered car) switch the LDR control off and on. The big knob on the lower photo controls the mix of the oscillators and the smaller two control the pulsewidth. And it has a pretty beefy sound. With a volume control and a filter you could make a whole album of gross drones, or with time and dedication you could make a musique concrete symphony. The pitch range is basically the audible spectrum.
I'll record something with it and get back to you.
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