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Musical Organ Created From 49 Floppy Disk Drives 76

Posted by samzenpus from the soothe-the-savage-student dept.
ErnieKey writes: A youth club in Germany, called Toolbox Bodensee, has created an unusual musical organ. It is constructed of 49 floppy disk drives all of which combine to play quite a unique sound. It has the ability to be played manually or act as a playback device. If you have a bunch of old floppy drives and want to assemble your own organ, the 3D print files are available for free download on Thingiverse.
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Musical Organ Created From 49 Floppy Disk Drives More

Musical Organ Created From 49 Floppy Disk Drives

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  • Assembling my organ is not what I usually do with it...

  • 49 (Score:2)

    by dohzer ( 867770 )

    Is 49 the number of GPIO pins on an Arduino Mega or something?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by JavaBear ( 9872 )

      According to the Arduino site, the Mega has 54 digital IO pins, and 16 analogue pins.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      49 is the usual number of keys in a four octave keyboard.

    • It's the number of keys on many smallish keyboards: 4 octaves of notes, usually C2 through C6 inclusive, so 4×12+1=49.
  • How lucky am I to live in a time where dadbods and floppy organs are trending.

  • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Actually organs are an instrument designed to imitate the sound of a pipe organ. E.g. the electric musical organ, an instrument which has been in common use for over 100 years with no blowing of air required.

      Now please take that pedantic organ in your head elsewhere.

    • Also, that is not a "youth club". It looks like a regular hackerspace.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      Then what is a Hammond organ?

    • Organs are defined by their way of operation which works by blowing air into pipes of different length to make a sound. What they built could be best described as an electro-mechanical keyboard (if it even has keys)

      "Organ[o]" is a Greek word meaning "Instrument" and, in Greek, a "musical organ" can be any "musical instrument" - the first "musical instrument" that was what is now defined by you "barbarians" (!) as "organ was made by Greeks ("Hydr-a-ylis" - "Hydraylic Pipe [Musical] Organ")

      • "Organ[o]" is a Greek word meaning "Instrument" and, in Greek, a "musical organ" can be any "musical instrument"

        Which might be relevant if we were speaking Greek rather than English.

        More relevant is that "organ" is used to refer to a lot of keyboard instruments that are intended to imitate (to some extent) the sound of a pipe organ. Whether or not this particular instrument falls into that category or not is probably largely a matter of opinion.

        • "Organ[o]" is a Greek word meaning "Instrument" and, in Greek, a "musical organ" can be any "musical instrument"

          Which might be relevant if we were speaking Greek rather than English.

          But you speak Greek: you call it "organ", so, speak it like a Greek, not like some "barbarian"! You know: "Greek m*th*rf*ck*r, do you speak it?"

          More relevant is that "organ" is used to refer to a lot of keyboard instruments that are intended to imitate (to some extent) the sound of a pipe organ. Whether or not this particular instrument falls into that category or not is probably largely a matter of opinion.

          Since "organ" is used to refer to a lot of things other than just musical instruments, even in English...

  • No morning coffee yet : why/how do the floppy drives produce different pitch?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Vibrating the read/write heads at different rates.

    • Re:No morning coffee yet (Score:4, Informative)

      by jiriw ( 444695 ) on Friday May 22, 2015 @05:40AM (#49749453) Homepage

      In a floppy disk drive there is a stepper motor which drive the read/write heads. That mechanism is used in normal operation to select the correct track/cylinder to read from/write to (a floppy drive is much like a modern hard disk drive in that respect, except the information density is way less and the 'disks' are of course portable).
      In the instance of this musical instrument/organ it's 'abused' by letting the stepper motor step with the frequency of the tone you want to play. The friction between the read/write heads and the rails they are gliding over makes the whole floppy housing vibrate a bit with the selected frequency. The housing acts as a resonance box and the vibration is transferred to the air where it produces sound waves in a frequency (the same the stepper motor vibrates with), you can hear.
      Because the stepper motor doesn't rotate smoothly but in steps (hence its name) the produced sound is rather 'sharp', 'blocky', or whatever you may call it (I have some difficulty here finding the correct musical jargon - English is not my native language). There are a lot of higher harmonics in it.
      Maybe if you saw the video in the original article, you noticed some random gaps in some of the notes played, where, if you knew the pieces played (they are rather popular numbers so I'll assume you know at least some of them), you would expect the note to continue. Those are caused because the head has reached the end of the track and now has to reverse (and so does the rotation direction of the stepper motor). That takes a moment in which no 'music' can be played.

  • I used to have a proggy that made music with a 5,25 floppy drive on my c=64 back in the '90's.

    • Did it play Beethoven's "Für Elise"?
      The one I had did, if I recall it correctly.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Lagmo ( 972467 )

        Did it play Beethoven's "Für Elise"? The one I had did, if I recall it correctly.

        Mine played "My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean" and promptly died 10 minutes later, it was quite an expensive repair too :/

  • ABD: Already Been Done (Score:3)

    by ihtoit ( 3393327 ) on Friday May 22, 2015 @03:37AM (#49749165)

    somewhere floating about from ~2010 is a bank of floppies playing the Imperial March...

  • No doubt... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by DerekLyons ( 302214 ) <fairwater@gmai l . c om> on Friday May 22, 2015 @03:42AM (#49749173) Homepage

    No doubt inspired by this guy [youtube.com], or any number of others like him who've been doing this for several year now.

    Though admittedly without the buzzword worthy but otherwise pointless 3D printed plastic brackets.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dave420 ( 699308 )
      Those are just 8 floppy drives playing music. This is a 49-floppy musical instrument which can be played in real-time by a pianist. That's quite the difference, and something you entirely failed to mention. I guess that would get in the way of Grumpy Old Man time, and take the wind out of you bitching about buzzwords and 3D-printing :)

      • That's quite the difference, and something you entirely failed to mention.

        I didn't mention it because it's a difference without a distinction - whether you press a key and the command is saved to a file for later replay, or immediately processed and sent to the "instrument", it's all the same. It's something that's been done many, many times before.

  • Dual use (Score:4, Funny)

    by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Friday May 22, 2015 @03:43AM (#49749177) Journal

    You can also use it to Bach up your files.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ihtoit ( 3393327 )

      Johnny comes home from school, and says to his mom, "Mommy, I learned the alphabet today! The rest of the class messed up around F, but I made it all the way through!" Johnny's mom says, "Very good, son. That's because you're a violist." Johnny comes home the next day and screams, "Mommy, Mommy, I counted to a hundred today! Everyone else couldn't get past 60, but I made it all the way to 100!" And his mom says, "Excellent. That's because you're a violist." The next day, Johnny comes home and says, "Mommy,

    • Re:Dual use (Score:5, Funny)

      by AthanasiusKircher ( 1333179 ) on Friday May 22, 2015 @06:44AM (#49749637)

      You can also use it to Bach up your files.

      I tried that. But, to be Franck, I couldn't Handel how the sound Varese in this thing, so I ended up Haydn this Creation away; now it's just Leonin the server Cage. If I Figaro out what will work better, I'll make a Chopin Liszt, and go buy something that's Godunov.

      Okay, very punny. We done now?

    • Only if you can't pronounce the "chi" sound correctly, as in "Loch" or "TeX".
  • But still it's cool in an industrial-music-sort-of-way.

  • there will unlikely be any more old floppy drives about.
    The next generation will have a bit of difficulty as they will have to use USB sticks,

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by fisted ( 2295862 )

      I always wanted retro USB drives that emulate the floppy disk drive sound when accessed. Maybe this will become a thing.

  • While this is very cool, I've always preferred the dot matrix music over the floppy drives. Something is just pleasant about seeing it print out on the page.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by fisted ( 2295862 )

      I occasionally listen to dot matrix, but to be honest, CNC mill is so much better. CNC mill over monster cables; it will blow your mind.

  • Why? It's been done before and it still sucks

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dave420 ( 699308 )
      The previous floppy-drive-musical-machines were pre-programmed to play a specific single piece of music. This one can be played in real-time by a pianist - it's an actual instrument, whereas the ones you are thinking of were just players.

  • This is a phenomenon where music is produced from the very sounds IT professionals most dreaded to hear. A symphony of aggravation The clattering brings to mind drives in which customers had somehow inserted two or floppies at once and managed to latch them down, bending all the retaining mechanisms. The shrill higher timbres reminiscent of a faulty drive controller or driver software run amok. Louder notes mean resonance in the enclosure which does not mean "wow what a cool sound", it means "oh shit somet

  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

    I tried to find different people doing it. Funny enough, the three songs played (Toccata and Fuge, He's a pirate and "the Tetris theme" (seriously, when will /. support Cyrillic characters?) were done by pretty much anyone doing floppy music.

    Yes, it's not interactive. But please, it's not like they invented the genre of floppy music, there's a ton of videos out there of people making music using floppies. With

    • If I told a customer "slash" when dictating a web address, most would ask "which direction?" So, I say "forward" slash when I want to save time on the phone. And yeah, they all use Windows.

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