The Xenophone is a circuit-bent Playschool Farm Friends Musical Xylophone. It has a bank of six animal noise samples and two tone samples, an octave of whole note keys, a bunch of lame built-in sequences and, oddly, the ability to record a sequence and play it back (though it's a little unpredictable). From a circuit-bending standpoint, it's not a great instrument (the CPU is a black blob), but it's a good one to start on and really shows what can be done by messing with the clock speed alone.

gdorn.nudio.net/cbent/xeno...l_tempo.jpg
The original device had a tempo control potentiometer that was locked to a fairly limited range, about 1k to 50k. This controlled the clock speed of the blob processor. I replaced this with a 1meg audio taper, allowing the clock speed to be lowered much, much further.

gdorn.nudio.net/cbent/xeno...ontacts.jpg
Also ran a pair of lines to a pair of body contacts (hard to picture), allowing the player to decrease resistance by using physical contact. This works surprisingly well and creates nice waah sounds.

gdorn.nudio.net/cbent/xeno...ch_jack.jpg
Added a 1/8" audio jack and a switch to go between internal speaker and jack. Sounds a lot better through amped computer speakers, though I may still need to add a capacitor across the terminals to reduce high-end noise.

Here's some samples.
(Sadly, they are a bit clipped - I've not recorded much with my laptop before. The DC offset is also really screwed up - the solution for recordings may be to mic an amp, just to clean up the sound a bit.)

gdorn.nudio.net/cbent/xeno/duck.mp3 makes some great yelps in the midrange.
gdorn.nudio.net/cbent/xeno/sheep.mp3 I haven't quite figured out what to do with.
gdorn.nudio.net/cbent/xeno/dog.mp3 makes more short yelps. It's too short to really mess with a lot - even at super-slow, it just comes out as noise.
gdorn.nudio.net/cbent/xeno/cow.mp3 has a great voice. Rapidly pitchbending it creates some sounds that remind me a little of the Delay Lama. At the low end, it breaks up nicely.
gdorn.nudio.net/cbent/xeno/pig.mp3 has a beat at the low end. Good for making looped filler noises.
gdorn.nudio.net/cbent/xeno/horse.mp3 is a wacky, hard-to-control sound. Because the original sample is so varied in pitch, crazy stuff happens when you slow it down a lot. It Waahs pretty nicely with the body contacts, but it's unpredictable. Very long sample that makes a neat noise-bient filler at the bottom end.

Okay, so the new layout is better than the old one, by far. There's just a few annoyances left. To address that, I've written a greasemonkey script
gdorn.nudio.net/greasemonk...ver.user.js

It:
-Un-truncates user names and tribe names in several places. It bothered me that posters and friends lists truncated at like 6 characters. Who has a 6-character username? (I mean, other than me.)
-Expands layouts to take up most of the browser's width, instead of just a 799-pixels-wide column. (I have a big screen. I'd like to use it, thanks.)
-Removes ads. (Yep.)

To use it, you'll need a way to run userscripts in your browser. On Firefox, you need the Greasemonkey extension. (Google it). On IE (but why?), you'll need either Trixie or Turnabout.