Siren Synth: Calling you to your demise.

I went to my local Dollar Tree, on the lookout for noise making toys. Im not sure if you know this, but everything at a dollar tree is one dollar or less. I got four of these guys.

They are advertised as walkie talkies, and also make mention of awesome sounds... this is no walkie talkie, nor does it even make more than one sound..... Just one siren swinging in and out.... kinda like a police siren...
I had recently broken a vintage analog kids keyboard and was very bummed about it. I realized what i could make when i bent the first siren.....

 As you can see from the photo above, bending it was pretty simple. There is one more bend that is not labeled. its on the top of the unlabled resistor on the left. It adds more pitch down. the other resistor, the one thats labeled, gives you the smaller range of pitch change.

 This guy caught a heck of a striper! lol! 

 This is a nice general overview of the brains of the sirens. ^^

 Theres a 47uf cap on the pot that gives the bend some teeth. i bridged the output with a 1m resistor, not really sure why.

 This is the switch (on the left) that turns on and off both of the sirens... as you can see i have a second switch right next to it to turn on and off the second siren. i basically interrupt the signal from the first switch to the second sirens power.

 Touch contacts are where its at! I use furniture nails, but you can use anything! Drawer pulls, spoons, nuts and blots... any thing that you can affix to your toy and can conduct electricity! 

^^this^^ was VERY interesting to me, a series of resistors
that change the pitch?! There's a bus wire attached to the other side of this white plastic thing
and there are small reed switches underneath... each end of the resistors you see soldered in place here

are connected to one of the reeds. Totally a design worth trying to recreate. 

See the bus wire?

These are the touch contacts. They were painted black and wouldnt conduct electricity very well like that.
I took my fishing hemostats and scraped the teeth over each one a few times, producing nifty stripes.

 This Is it complete! I've painted it put it all together and it works! I was very excited!

Wanna hear what it sounds like? See how it plays? Check it out here!