This small, rectangular plastic alarm clock with the golden dome on
its top roars everybody out of the bed, because while a small light bulb
illuminates the clock face, it plays for up to 5 minutes every 10 seconds
a tremendously loud and very freaky sounding sample of a muezzin (Islam
pray caller). This crowing low- res sample contains multiple, well audible
loop points and sounds so terrific and bizarre that it turns the entire
clock into a caricature of itself. Not enough with this; when the batteries
get only slightly empty, the sound pitch howls like a dying cassette recorder
while the bulb flickers in the speed of the sample loops like when it was
just designed to subversively annoy Saddam Hussein and the entire world
of Islamist dictators. By my ears it even seriously sounds like when the
CPU of this poor little clock rather wants to cry: "Allah is not enough"
instead of proclaiming the intended "Allah'u aqbar*".
This absurd little thing with its alarm- siren- like timbre reminds
me quite a lot of the screaming alarm clock from the German children novel
"Die 3 Fragezeichen und der seltsame Wecker". I didn't modify mine, but
for a fan of freaky sound toy ICs it must be fun to modulate the clock
speed with anything else. (The sound CPU is a little COB (black blob) sticking
on a separate mini PCB directly behind the speaker.) The "Azan Clock" was
sold in turkish shops and exists in multiple colour variants with silver
or golden dome, and also completely different looking ones may exist. The
alarm of this clock is switches off by pressing down the dome, but I also
own a white (even older?) version which has a slightly wider case and a
separate oval "alarm off" push button at the left top side of the case.
I once even saw a digital travel alarm clock with the muezzin call, but
its sample was much cleaner/ less robotic (and even faded silence at the
end to simulate reverberation), and due to it was crystal clocked, I guess
it would also never start to howl by empty running batteries, which makes
the digital version way less interesting for circuit bending. I don't know
if the analogue "Azan Clock" with the freakily synthetic sounding chip
is still in production, or if they have replaced the chip with a boring
natural sounding one now.
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