James Houston
1 HN recommender · recommended in 5 months, 2011–2022
3:55 · 1.1M views · Jun 4, 2008
James Houston's entry to Radiohead's Nude remix contest, performing the 6/8, 63bpm song on obsolete hardware such as hard drives, a dot matrix printer, a scanner and a ZX Spectrum.
It is the canonical example HN brings up in threads about music hacks on floppy drives, printers and other junk hardware.
5 comments from Hacker News
If you haven't seen this yet, this is probably the best example of a hack like this that I've seen. It was submitted for a contest that radiohead held, and I believe was the winner (it takes about a minute to get rolling): this video The sound of the scanner is pretty awesome. And the original by radiohead in case you need some context. [LINK]
This is brilliant. It reminds me of the old HP ScanJets, which came with SCSI commands to play musical notes[0] (someone at HP must have had too much free time on his hands ;)). Some videos of the scanners are at [1] and [2]. Another interesting hardware hack to produce music is the "hard drive speaker". You can see some of them in action in a rendition of Radiohead's "Big Ideas: don't get any" [3], as well as various printers and other devices used for their auditive side effects. [0]: [LINK] [1]: [LINK] [2]: [LINK] [3]: this video
Not exactly the same thing but it reminds me of James Houston's cover of Radiohead's Nude on hard drives, a dot matrix printer, a scanner, and a sinclair ZX Spectrum. this video This says 14 years ago.
Ah, disappointing. I was expecting some giant array of them all running in unison and making beautiful "music". Sorta like the radiohead hardware hobbyist video this video
For a brief second I thought your link was the Radiohead cover that used old computer equipment, including hard drives as speakers. Here’s that link: this video