More hardware music

posted Jun 7th 2008 5:15pm by Eliot Phillips
filed under: home entertainment hacks

today and tomorrow found a few more projects using computer hardware to create music like our earlier Radiohead post. Above is a rendition of The Imperial March using a 3.5 inch floppy drive. Two more projects are embedded below.

harddisko is a collection of defective hard drives from various manufacturers, repair shops, and institutions. The drives are all wired to separate power circuits. As each one powers up, it runs its own unique sounding self test.

Lastly, is the BeggingBot. Using multiple floppy drives and hard drives it performs music. It then asks for donations via the CD tray.

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Comments [7]

tagged: floppydrive, harddrive, hardware, music

Reader Comments

Nice.
That floppy drive idea seems like it shouldn’t be very hard at all. And i’m sure i have a few drives laying around here somewhere…

Posted at 5:39 pm on Jun 7th, 2008 by yert

put in a beat and make it play some hardstyle xD

Posted at 5:52 pm on Jun 7th, 2008 by alex mccown

#1 FTW.

I guess it really is “A long time ago, in a galaxy far away”.

Posted at 7:07 pm on Jun 7th, 2008 by Nox13last

Was that last one trying to play Kraftwerk (Robots) at one point? ^^

Posted at 12:27 am on Jun 8th, 2008 by Fivelo

defenitly “robots” at the last part, thats soo awesome. To be lame…how does anyone control these drives and such to make music?

Posted at 1:30 am on Jun 8th, 2008 by adam sidelsky

Most FDD hacks directly interface with the stepper motors of the drives and use a microcontroller to shoot a PWM signal to get the head to move. the shorter the pulses, the higher the note, I believe..

Really cool hack, I would have expected them to do something like that for the 2nd vid, although timing the self-test failures is pretty nifty too.

Posted at 3:37 am on Jun 8th, 2008 by firestorm_v1

http://www.vimeo.com/1109226?pg=embed&sec=1109226

Posted at 1:00 pm on Jun 8th, 2008 by telex