Music played by varying the motor speeds on a bunch of old floppy drives.
I’m a bit skeptical that this is real.
The granddaddy is James Houston’s entry in a contest to remix Radiohead’s Nude, featuring a lengthy (but four times faster than into my old Timex Sinclair 1000) load from cassette tape into a Sinclair Spectrum. See, kids, this is the sort of crap that occupied Gramps’ nights while he waited for your mother to fall asleep.
What I think makes you skeptical is how musical it is. That’s because he’s pushing all of the melody onto a modern audio card, with the other hardware barely used. All Houston had was the Spectrum’s internal audio playing the melody while also controlling the hardware. Not bad for a 3.5MHz processor and showing why the Z80 is still a workhorse.
Well, unless it’s all CGI (doubt it, especially when that smoke came in), it would seem strange to have the entirety of the video (synchronized lights, hard drive arms, etc.) to be real, and* not *the sound. Usually when you fake videos, it’s the other way around.
I’m not skeptical. Back when I had a C64 there was a program I downloaded from Quantum Link that caused the 1541 floppy drive to hum “Daisy Bell”. The tone sounded very much like what’s in the video.
The cool thing about that program was that because the 1541 had its own processor, all the computer did was copy the program into the 1541’s memory and told the 1541 to execute it. You could then unplug the drive and it would continue to “sing”.
Here it is, Doug: The Singing 1541 Floppy Drive - YouTube . I can’t imagine it was good for the 1541.
I never owned nor used a Commodore, but I still remember model numbers.
Floppotron is real. You can control the frequency of a large number of computer components, and some things like the scanners and printers make specific sounds when they are at a certain range of their movement. I always assumed those tones were an artifact of the construction, but now I wonder if it was part of their calibration. The Roland CAD cutting machine at my wife’s job an age and a half ago would play a nifty song as it powered up, as well. IIRC, there was a C64 virus that would play a tune on your floppy drive when you loaded it in memory. OH WAIT, THAT WAS MENTIONED. SEE TITLE.
More info on how it works here at Mentalfloss
But, I’m also pretty fascinated with it’s cover of Marble Machine. He even recreated the rickety sound of him cranking up the improbable Lego machine used in the Wintergatan original. If he was faking it, he’d be cool enough to have a “brakedown” lever like Wintergatan’s has.
The Floppotron was born to play Cars, but I love it’s version of Misirlou.
Thunderstruck on keyboard, drums, guitar, clothes dryer, coffee machine, and floppotron.
Nothing fake about Flopportron. He has a MIDI sequencer that controls the stepper motors in the floppy drives to make the desired frequencies. Once you have that set up, it’s just a matter of getting a MIDI of whatever song you want to hear and playing it. My favorite one is DANGER ZONE!.
The really clever bit is using deliberate head crashes on the old HD’s for percussion.