What happens when hardware techniques are ported in the software domain? Musicians obsessed by fetish drum machines as Roland 303 should know, if they ever tested Propellerhead’s ReBirth, for example. But what does it mean to abstract resounding hardware into predictable software code? The gesture is gone, so are the manipulation skills but something different and ethereal is left anyway. Berrtill is a distortion unit plug in modeled from circuit bent hardware. It’s not really simulating a classic circuit bending session (trying to extract sounds, creatively connecting sound generating chips), but embedding the typical distortion characteristics of (mal)functioning in the selected sound data. As expected that abstracting would not gain the same results nor the enthusiasm of using electric wires and a soldering iron, discovering untold sound possibilities. This software embodies a specific experiment connecting a car speaker, a kazoo and a modified tape recorder, all then programmed as an effect through a rendering ‘formula’. But even if the plug is so specific and seem to accomplish a little more than entertaining and educational purposes, publishing a software means also to make an implicit statement. Here this consists of a legitimation of circuit bending as a composing technique.- Neural.