YouTube isn't exactly short of low-tech musical recreations of famous songs, particularly when it comes to the humble floppy drive. The once ubiquitous storage device has belted out classics like Haddaway's "What Is Love?," Metallica's "Master of Puppets," and (my personal favourite) the theme tune from Nintendo's Super Mario Bros. But for the most part, these floppy musicians have been restricted to mere five-piece bands rather than full-blown orchestral powerhouses.
A group of enterprising individuals from an electronics-focused youth club in Germany decided to change all that and build what may well be one of the most impressive floppy instruments on the planet. The Floppy Orgel (that's Floppy Organ to the English-speaking folks of the world), consists of 49 old floppy disk drives mounted onto a large board via custom-designed 3D-printed parts. The drives are hooked up to an Arduino Uno running Sammy1Am's GitHub "Moppy" code, which translates standard MIDI signals into motor pulses for the drives.
What's most impressive about the Floppy Orgel, aside from the neat colour-coordinated mounting brackets, is just how well it works when directly connected to a keyboard MIDI controller. In the youth club's video of the Orgel (embedded below), songs like Yiruma's "River Flows in You," Celine Dion's "My Heart Will Go On," and the Tetris theme are played out with surprising accuracy, despite a delay between pressing a key on the keyboard and the drive playing that note.
According to the youth group, the initial plan was to construct a mere four-drive instrument before deciding to "go big or go home" and pull together 49 drives. The group also plans to add features like LED lights to highlight when a particular note is played "so that playing the organ is more intriguing in a dark room."
Musical floppy drives are made by manipulating the internal motor that moves the read/write heads over the floppy disk. Each floppy disk is divided into 80 tracks radially from the centre, each of which the notoriously noisy floppy drive motor can send the read/write head to. By pulsing the motor at any of those 80 positions, representing different frequencies, you can create a particular musical note. And, because floppy drives don't contain their own controllers, they're far easier to manipulate with third-party boards and tools like the Arduino.
The technique has become so common on YouTube that floppy drive music even has its own Know Your Meme page. That said, perhaps the best low-tech music comes not from just one type of device but several. I'll leave you with my absolute favourite piece of low-tech music ever, a rendition of Radiohead's "Nude" played with a Sinclair ZX Spectrum, an old printer, a scanner, and 10 hard drives.
Listing image by 3DPrint.com
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