It wasn’t too long before the early people started throwing stones together that no one in the tribe thought they could improve things a bit by working out a little rhythm. As the first musician was born, and since humanity had to record sound millions of years ago, musical performances had to be experienced directly throughout most of history. On the cosmic scale of things, Spotify shows about one zepsecond before the Big Bash at midnight.
So it is only fitting that [Linus Åkesson] The musical floppy drive is so perfect that it can now be played live. We understand the embarrassment of showing it through the video below the break, but we think it’s still across the point – instead of getting a whole array of carefully-scripted drives going to perform something that even comes close to a musical number, he’s a real-time one. Able to create tones by manipulating a single drive.
In his writings, [Linus] Not only does the floppy drive go beyond the usual nuts and bolts of music making, but it specifically explains how this Commodore 1541-II drive has been transformed into a new life as a digital virtuoso. There’s a lot going on, from experimenting to determine which drive moves to the most pleasing sound, from adding a small microphone and a piezo sensor attached to an LMC662-based amplifier to provide a high-fidelity capture of drive noise and vibrations. . Here is valuable information for anyone else looking to create some sweet tunes with their old gear.
We’ve seen some of the resurgence of 3.5-inch floppy drives this year, where people like Adafruit are digging into the classic storage medium and an experimental project to allow the Arduino IDE to create bootable x86 floppy. You won’t hear any complaints from us – although they may not offer much more power than modern technology, there is something about the stack of multi-colored discs with hastily applied labels that warm our cold robotic hearts.