Paweł Zadrożniak
4 HN mentions · mentioned in 4 months, 2019–2025
2:24 · 4.6M views · Oct 14, 2017
The Floppotron plays a cover of Eurythmics' Sweet Dreams using an orchestra of old computer hardware such as floppy drives, hard drives and scanners, driven by microcontrollers. It is a short music performance rather than an explanation.
HN uses it as the go-to example of music played on obsolete computer hardware, linked whenever floppy drives, odd sounds or machine music come up.
4 comments from Hacker News
See also: The Floppotron: Music played on old floppy drives, hard drives, and scanners. this video Animusic: CG animations of fantastic machines playing music. The animation is parameterized to the MIDI input. Attempts to build real-world working models of these machines or machines like them have been made, with varying levels of success: [LINK] Compressorhead: An all-robot heavy metal band. Famous for Stickboy, the band's four-armed, headbanging drummer, or at least Stickboy is what I remember most about the band. [LINK]
> Super cool that the motors can be used for things other than moving the vehicle. It reminds me of how ESCs for RC vehicles use the motors to generate audible chirp tones to indicate status. > Motors are multi-purpose devices! In WALL-E , one of the robots following the title character, lacking any audio output, spins its motors at different rates to play the tune from Hello, Dolly! that it had learned from WALL-E. See also the Floppotron: this video
Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) is also a good fit: this video There's a good version on Tesla coils too: [LINK] Interestingly, there's no Floppotron version of Bad Apple! - i think that tradition comes from a later era of internet stunt music.
> some weird SCSI card (soundblaster with SCSI, I think) I can't help but imagine it as working similiar to the Floppotron... this video