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  • gffrd · 4 years ago

    This had me smiling the whole time …

    I love it when projects go so far beyond beyond what was intended, well beyond where most people would have stopped or lost interest, and in to the land of the absurd and hilarious.

    This reminds me of the joy in the fun things I've done just for the sake of taking them as far as they could be taken.

    Thanks for sharing.

        • hermitdev · 4 years ago

          Wow, that is amazingly absurd. I love it!

        • naikrovek · 4 years ago

          that guy is amazing and i fanboy out a little when I think about what i'd talk to him about if I ever met him. he's not even famous, he's just everything I want to be. i'm not as smart as him, or as clever, or as educated, or ... etc.

          • devenvdev · 4 years ago

            Came here to post this ↑ Tom7's Uppestcase and Lowestcase Letters [1] is one of the most entertaining (and educational) experiences I had lately

            [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLRdruqQfRk

            • cbm-vic-20 · 4 years ago

              "Tetris is an inventory management survival horror game."

              • tambourine_man · 4 years ago

                This was amazing, thanks for sharing.

                Edit: his whole channel is awesome, what a great find. He also sorted all of StarWars dialog, manually, as one does:

                “This is the Special Edition to troll Han-shot-first purists. Everyone knows the orig is the most legit.”

                Someone who really invests in his trollage.

                • 5- · 4 years ago

                  tom7 is great!

                  his perhaps lesser known, but fantastic and way more interactive creation is his icfpc'06 work, http://www.boundvariable.org/

                  i don't know of any worthy english-language writeups, perhaps they will be posted in replies to this comment.

                    • gffrd · 4 years ago

                      I had no idea who Tom7 is, and now that I do, you're right: I LOVE this stuff. Thank you!

                      What an excellent example of using non-standard formats to explore interesting concepts and be exposed to different ways of thinking. This is what high school should be like. Actually, what am I saying: this is what it feels like to tinker with your pals in high school.

                      And now I'm looking at SIGBOVIK, Annals of Improbable Research, CMU's "ASSOCIATION FOR COMPUTATIONAL HERESY," the Ig Nobel prize … what a wonderful rabbit trail you've sent me down.

                    • kilroy123 · 4 years ago

                      Absolutely, the same.

                      • ryan77627 · 4 years ago

                        Made an account just to say this: anyone who hasnt heard of the SIGBOVIK conferences should look up the minutes from this year and read through some of the papers submitted, maybe even go through a few years.

                        And yes, Tom7 is a frequent contributor :)

                        • tirwander · 4 years ago

                          I feel like it's this little shit that really bring happiness.

                        • superb-owl · 4 years ago

                          This is incredible. There's something about the convergence of technology and art that I find super satisfying.

                          • injidup · 4 years ago

                            I saw a version of this over 30 years ago. One the geek kids in our group who could program assembly found it a giggle to turn the computer lab into a musical instrument via floppy drive seek commands. Next trick...turn a Tesla into a musical instrument via the motor drives.

                            • qbasic_forever · 4 years ago

                              > Next trick...turn a Tesla into a musical instrument via the motor drives.

                              Renault did it some years ago to demonstrate how much control they have on their F1 engine drivetrain: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRXwWbo_mX0

                              • rzzzt · 4 years ago

                                Siemens Taurus locomotive engines have some musicality hidden in the power switching section: https://youtu.be/-SDYdHzT7Qw

                                • ChuckNorris89 · 4 years ago

                                  I wonder what's actually making the noise. PWM on the transformer windings, or PWM on the motor windings themselves, or did they just use speakers? I have so many questions.

                                  • rzzzt · 4 years ago

                                    Overhead power lines are 15 kV, 16⅔ Hz AC in Austria; the drivetrain is of the variable voltage-variable frequency (VVVF) kind, and conversion to three-phase power is done using solid state components. Comments say these switching elements (IGBT or GTO thyristors) apply lower frequency to the motor at start, then gradually increase once it is in motion. So I'd say the "glorified coil whine" comes mainly from the motor windings.

                                    More singing:

                                    - https://youtu.be/llBI_L21d3g

                                    - https://www.reddit.com/r/trains/comments/ilxxt7/these_trains...

                                  • speed_spread · 4 years ago

                                    Montreal's Metro old cars had a similar three-note signature sound. The notes have preserved as the "door closing" chime in the new cars: https://youtu.be/Hu_1JM_UiuA

                                  • MBCook · 4 years ago

                                    A great many years ago (early 2000s) I tried to get a number of computers to play a simple melody in harmony using PC speaker beeps.

                                    To try to keep them in sync I used broadcast Ethernet packets.

                                    It worked. Sort of. Then fell out of sync. They were generally on time (thanks to the sync) but had enough difference to be easily noticeable and kind of annoying.

                                    Not unlike a first school band recital.

                                    It was fun. Half the project was getting the speakers to beep because that’s a Win16 function I was calling from a Win32 context and I had to thunk into it.

                                      • dannersy · 4 years ago

                                        This has stayed in my bookmarks for 14 years. Great stuff.

                                    • loudthing · 4 years ago

                                      That retro looking CLI gui is pretty slick.

                                      • layer8 · 4 years ago

                                        TUI, not CLI.

                                        • loudthing · 4 years ago

                                          You must be fun at parties.

                                          Edit: :P

                                      • alkaloid · 4 years ago

                                        I'm curious as to why the resettable breaker for each eight drives . . .

                                        I presume this was trial-and-error, but how could someone tell that the current is too much for a disk drive which is being, uh, overdriven (to make noise!)?

                                        Or maybe this was a "just in case" situation...?

                                        So cool . . .

                                        • MBCook · 4 years ago

                                          He must have enough experience by now of knowing how floppies can fail (especially when doing something so odd) to know it’s useful.

                                          Probably just hard won knowledge that almost no one else would ever have.

                                          Kind of cool in a way.

                                          • porbelm · 4 years ago

                                            The video has clips from the previous iterations, in remembrance, and one of them shows quite a bit of smoke in the room...

                                          • recursivedoubts · 4 years ago

                                            not all heroes wear capes, but this guy needs a cape

                                            • YakBizzarro · 4 years ago

                                              My question is: where did he find 512 floppy drives??

                                              • Forge36 · 4 years ago

                                                eBay? "Floppy drive Lot"

                                              • supportengineer · 4 years ago

                                                Amazing project. I remember having a C64 program that would play a tune using the 1541 disk drive.

                                                • anyfoo · 4 years ago

                                                  I remember that. There used to be all kinds of warnings about possibly damaging your drive and what not, that, retrospectively, were mostly overblown. But I guess the computer magazines of the time (almost my only source for this stuff back then) didn't want any liability in the rare case when.

                                                  I also fondly remember one program that made the drive's red access LED pulsate really softly on and off. Not only was I blown away that the drive can do that (I didn't know what pulse width modulation was back then), LEDs were still somewhat new enough at the time that I might not have seen a softly pulsating one before. It was really pretty.

                                                  • vintermann · 4 years ago

                                                    LFT, a Swedish demoscene guy fairly well known on HN due to his impressive exploits, has some lower key projects as well. One is for playing live music on the C64, and in this video he hooked up a 1541 as well:

                                                    https://youtu.be/mbhQ36bd870

                                                    • jansan · 4 years ago

                                                      Yes, it was "My Bonnie is Over the Ocean". We played it only once or twice because we were afraid that this could break the disk drive and there just was no money for a new one :)

                                                      • benoliver999 · 4 years ago

                                                        I love that he made it use MIDI, it makes it so flexible

                                                        • frizkie · 4 years ago

                                                          I want very badly to listen to a bunch of old N64 game tracks on this thing.

                                                          This is the stuff of legends, nice work Paweł!

                                                          • shdon · 4 years ago

                                                            I love it for sheer we-can-do-it-just-for-the-heck-of-it-ness, though I admit I'm a bit nostalgic for Floppotron 2 as the new one sounds a bit too smooth for my tastes, losing some of that charm.

                                                            • sigmonsays · 4 years ago

                                                              i'm pleasantly surprised and amazed. I've seen these through the years but the sound quality on this is absolutely amazing!

                                                              • criddell · 4 years ago

                                                                I’d love a spatial audio recording. I’d love to hear it as if I were sitting in the middle of it.

                                                              • mgdlbp · 4 years ago

                                                                Awesome, the 2.0 decommissioning last week had scared. There's a spectacular variety of ways that music has been made in unconventional electromechanical ways--on the head motors of floppy drives 3.5", 5.25", and 8", on hard drive voice coils, scanner carriage motors, steppers wherever the're found in CNC devices, dot-matrix printheads, pulsed laser cutters, tesla coils, all the way back to radio interference generated by the IBM 1401 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPk8MVEmiTI).

                                                                The 1401 video I actually saw in an older related HN submission; lots of comments linking out to different examples in these threads. Here are a couple, someone might be able to aggregate a bunch more:

                                                                "Eye of the Tiger" played on a dot-matrix printer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9286555 (2015, 62 comments)

                                                                "Imperial March" on a single floppy drive: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2230849 (2011, 27 comments)

                                                                Both the news site and original video of the second submission are lost to time, but luckily our saviour (of web content) Brewster Kahle has graced us with a copy in the Internet Archive.[1] The Wayback Machine also remembers a time when YouTube recommendations bore greater relevance--those on the archived video page from 2011[2] are entirely of videos of computer hardware music. Some might even still be up today.

                                                                [1] https://web.archive.org/web/0id_/wayback-fakeurl.archive.org...

                                                                [2] https://web.archive.org/web/0/http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

                                                                "Imperial March" was also what was played on the first incarnation of the Floppotron, with an impressively full sound from only two floppy drives (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHJOz_y9rZE).

                                                                And perhaps related are those videos of the pleasingly periodic percussion of uncontrolled devices like (broken) washing machines, electronic typewriters, and air conditioners.

                                                                • MBCook · 4 years ago

                                                                  I just randomly saw 2.0 decommissioning video last week. I hoped he was working on a new one (no idea it was ready!) but figured it may just be the end of the Floppytron era.

                                                                  Very happy to see this.

                                                                  • rkagerer · 4 years ago

                                                                    That "Eye of the Tiger" on the dot matrix is beautiful.

                                                                  • mNovak · 4 years ago

                                                                    Those floppy stacks sound delightfully like a harpsichord

                                                                    • pkaye · 4 years ago

                                                                      They should add SSDs to the mix.

                                                                      • ruined · 4 years ago

                                                                        an ssd would greatly improve playback time. seriously, a single modern nvme drive could probably beat this whole setup. so pointless...

                                                                        • dredmorbius · 4 years ago

                                                                          Those would be exceedingly well-suited to some John Cage.

                                                                        • Vladimof · 4 years ago

                                                                          Probably the best one of it's kind, so far.

                                                                            • nicce · 4 years ago

                                                                              Fascinating, why I have never seen this one.

                                                                            • Agingcoder · 4 years ago

                                                                              This is utterly insane, and absolutely amazing.

                                                                              • adamredwoods · 4 years ago

                                                                                Wow. How loud is it?

                                                                                Also, why didn't he use any SSDs? (j/k)

                                                                                • Forge36 · 4 years ago

                                                                                  The clicking noise was probably too quiet

                                                                                  • kube-system · 4 years ago

                                                                                    They'd be perfect for playing the rests.

                                                                                • robbomacrae · 4 years ago

                                                                                  I've often wished there was a way programming could produce art as a by product. That way we could see something more tangible for our efforts, have a landmark system for help recalling it all, and show progress to our non technical family members.

                                                                                  This has made me think that making music as a by product would also be pretty neat.. being able to hear different sounds for different functions would be a much more intuitive way of inspecting the overall health and performance of your system than trudging through logs.

                                                                                  If anyone knows of anything like this I would be happy to pay for it!

                                                                                  • nikanj · 4 years ago

                                                                                    Are you familiar with the demo scene?

                                                                                    • robbomacrae · 4 years ago

                                                                                      A little. Isn't the point of the demo to be the visual? Which to be fair, is like how the original post purpose is the music itself. But I was thinking something that happened as a happy accidental extra result of whatever you're doing with auto generated visual representations of how your code fits together like some Escher contraption.

                                                                                      • vintermann · 4 years ago

                                                                                        The demoscene exhibits and competes on music and hardware as well as graphics. There are a couple of demos which do all three, running on homemade or modded hardware.

                                                                                    • jahewson · 4 years ago

                                                                                      What’s that awful noise in the background, getting louder and louder?

                                                                                      Oh, that? We just ignore it. They call it technical debt.

                                                                                      • GuestHNUser · 4 years ago

                                                                                        This idea is hilarious. If only every function was given a sound so you could hear a cacophony of mistakes every time it was run. Imagine a programmer Bach, someone who could somehow weave a beautiful rhythm into their standard library function calls.

                                                                                        • CamperBob2 · 4 years ago

                                                                                          Hold an AM radio next to your motherboard sometime. There were certain elders, long passed to the Grey (Beard) Havens, who claimed they could debug their programs that way.

                                                                                        • ajuc · 4 years ago

                                                                                          My uncle made alarm go off when somebody opens a gate in my parents fence years ago. He used old auto alarm. It sounds like a submarine about to launch torpedoes:)

                                                                                          We learnt to ignore it in a few months, but it's funny when guests hear it for the first time.

                                                                                        • ajford · 4 years ago

                                                                                          So it's not exactly what you're talking about, but the Parkes radio telescope used to have it's control system wired up with speakers and the control software used Australian animal sounds for various statuses and errors. So when things went well it would sound like a peaceful wilderness.

                                                                                          Supposedly after a while, you could tell how things were going by the shift in the animal sounds, even for minor shifts from normal operation. And of course the various alerts used loud noises like panicked Kookaburra (if I'm recalling correctly), so those definitely got the attention of even novice operators.

                                                                                          • astatine · 4 years ago

                                                                                            A colleague of mine had set up an audio alarm which would go off every time a build failed. It made everyone a lot more cautious when they checked in their code.

                                                                                          • grog454 · 4 years ago

                                                                                            > I've often wished there was a way programming could produce art as a by product

                                                                                            That's pretty much what computer graphics programming is.

                                                                                            • jachee · 4 years ago

                                                                                              Check out [Sonic Pi](https://sonic-pi.net/). It’s a self-described “code-based music creation and performance tool”.

                                                                                              I’ve noodled around with it a bit, and it’s pretty cool.

                                                                                              • robbomacrae · 4 years ago

                                                                                                Yes I suppose sonic pi could be used to map logs to an audio stream. I might have to tinker with this. Thanks!

                                                                                                • 867-5309 · 4 years ago

                                                                                                  wow, that's quite something!

                                                                                                  >a friendly tutorial

                                                                                                  >54,019 words 307,466 characters

                                                                                                  it's basically a flat file docs

                                                                                                • Cthulhu_ · 4 years ago

                                                                                                  A cool one is Gource, which creates a fancy visualization of your codebase's history: https://gource.io/

                                                                                                  • robbomacrae · 4 years ago

                                                                                                    Looks pretty cool. Thanks!

                                                                                                      • StillBored · 4 years ago

                                                                                                        I guess you just need a PC from the early/mid 1990's with a soundblaster/clone sound card. Those cards overwhelmingly didn't have good power filters on their audio amps/etc and when the gain was turned up a bit you could hear the ISA/PCI bus noise.

                                                                                                        I remember my PC made very distinct noises when scrolling text, compiling, and various other operations.

                                                                                                        I vaguly remember a reading somewhere a couple years ago that someone had hooked up a click noise to linux syscalls and context switches for this basic purpose.

                                                                                                        I just wish machines still had disk I/O leds. My laptop (a dell) is one of the last machines I've seen with a disk activity led, because it switches the charge led to disk activity with a fn key combination.

                                                                                                        Also, if you want satisfaction there are various industries where computers are used to control mechanical devices. I worked in one where a large robot was being controlled by our software. Nothing more exciting than writing some code and hearing that think whirl and clunk away. Or somewhat frequently banging against end stops and the like when we had bugs.

                                                                                                      • user3939382 · 4 years ago

                                                                                                        I would predict that he's either single or his wife is rolling her eyes :D I LOVE it

                                                                                                        • zackkitzmiller · 4 years ago

                                                                                                          Ahh yes. The two male companionship choices. Single, or married to a woman annoyed with his hobbies.

                                                                                                        • jonstewart · 4 years ago

                                                                                                          Someone get this man a daisywheel printer!

                                                                                                          • kinnth · 4 years ago

                                                                                                            I've never seen anything like this, nor will I ever see it again. Thank you. Please gift this to a museum when you're ready!

                                                                                                            • listenfaster · 4 years ago

                                                                                                              Bravo. Anyone else destroy their friend's Commodore 1541 running drive songs?

                                                                                                              • mikehollinger · 4 years ago

                                                                                                                It's like a new kind of pipe organ. I love it. :-)

                                                                                                                • Maursault · 4 years ago

                                                                                                                  There's just too much time involved here. How many man-decades? It's because of the hardware. You have to appreciate anyone that would take the time to get one floppy working. One. Someone should virtualize all this for him so he has time for other things.

                                                                                                                  • WesolyKubeczek · 4 years ago

                                                                                                                    Is this hobby-shaming? O_o

                                                                                                                    • Maursault · 4 years ago

                                                                                                                      By having an idea of the often frustrating labor involved in working on floppy drives, and being astounded by the sheer volume of work and time involved revealed by and culminating in a short video of a performance, and showing concern for the artist not being able to, you know, have time to sleep, eat, fap, etc., you somehow think I may be "shaming" what you call his "hobby?" No, of course not, but I will shame your straw man for the fallacy that it is, and I will shame your inaccurate and insulting labelling of a mechanical and digital many-threat masterpiece as a "hobby."

                                                                                                                  • givemeethekeys · 4 years ago

                                                                                                                    It's stuff like this that makes me question the meaning of life and the point of "worthwhile pursuits".

                                                                                                                    Pure art. I hope this ends up in a museum.

                                                                                                                    • softcactus · 4 years ago

                                                                                                                      With this many floppies capable of creating discrete tones, I bet you could synthesize human speech. Running a Fourier Transform for some speech clip and then having each floppy play a different frequency.

                                                                                                                    • reaperducer · 4 years ago

                                                                                                                      The earliest iteration of this sort of thing that I know of is the Commodore 1541 being programmed to play Bicycle Built for Two.

                                                                                                                      Are there earlier examples?

                                                                                                                      • 7402 · 4 years ago

                                                                                                                        It's not exactly the same but in the early 1970s PDP-8 computers could play music by generating radio frequency interference in a manner that could be picked up by a nearby AM radio. The sound was not mechanically generated, but it had the same hacker spirit to it.

                                                                                                                        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMsyvBxEcSc

                                                                                                                          • mdp2021 · 4 years ago

                                                                                                                            Aged 11, around 1982, Richard David "Aphex Twin" James used a (per se mute) Sinclair ZX81 to have the (video) connected television produce sound through video signals; it is not clear if he also coded music using that trick. He would buy his first synth the following year.

                                                                                                                          • LegitShady · 4 years ago

                                                                                                                            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.

                                                                                                                            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmfHHLfbjNQ

                                                                                                                            This says 14 years ago.

                                                                                                                            • pygy_ · 4 years ago

                                                                                                                              That rendition is brilliant

                                                                                                                            • narven · 4 years ago

                                                                                                                              amazing work and pacience

                                                                                                                              • globalnode · 4 years ago

                                                                                                                                this was amazing

                                                                                                                                • wrycoder · 4 years ago

                                                                                                                                  I think I'll just go home now...

                                                                                                                                  • sam537 · 4 years ago

                                                                                                                                    The internet can still be a beautiful place.

                                                                                                                                      • kube-system · 4 years ago

                                                                                                                                        I bet this sounds awesome in person. I hope this ends up in some sort of museum some day so I can hear it.

                                                                                                                                        • AceJohnny2 · 4 years ago

                                                                                                                                          By having his devices (say, the floppies) driven in columnar groups (controlling number of active devices for volume), did he accidentally create a phased array speaker?

                                                                                                                                          • yetihehe · 4 years ago

                                                                                                                                            No, they are only enabled/disabled to run simultaneously. To create phased array, you would need to control phase (delay in time) of each drive separately. It could be probably done with this setup, but I don't see a good reason to do phased array using devices which do not emit clean enough sound.

                                                                                                                                          • tomcam · 4 years ago

                                                                                                                                            Intonation surprisingly good!

                                                                                                                                            • nickwanninger · 4 years ago

                                                                                                                                              Not long till can we have a GB of floppys on one table. Imagine!

                                                                                                                                              • koyao · 4 years ago

                                                                                                                                                But why?

                                                                                                                                                • mdp2021 · 4 years ago

                                                                                                                                                  As they said of Engelbart.

                                                                                                                                                  Not only the demo has its technical worth: that "synth" can sound amazingly.

                                                                                                                                                • peterkelly · 4 years ago

                                                                                                                                                  This needs an old-school theatre organ console hooked up to it

                                                                                                                                                  • allset_ · 4 years ago

                                                                                                                                                    Love the Floppotron, glad to see it alive and well! Keep it up!

                                                                                                                                                    • bencollier49 · 4 years ago

                                                                                                                                                      This is incredible and what a project! But the retrocomputing enthusiast inside me winces a little at all that lovely old hardware being wrecked..

                                                                                                                                                      • lqet · 4 years ago

                                                                                                                                                        I would pay significant amounts of money to see a live performance of this contraption.

                                                                                                                                                        • agentbellnorm · 4 years ago

                                                                                                                                                          Was thinking the same! They should do a tour where they play music but also talk about how it all works, q&a etc.

                                                                                                                                                          • Phileosopher · 4 years ago

                                                                                                                                                            I'm fairly certain HN has almost enough people that they could make it a viable venue (geography-contextually, naturally). Add some meme marketing to it with some vague overtones about making the world love something they didn't love before and it'll get memorialized as a TEDtalk.

                                                                                                                                                            • s0rce · 4 years ago

                                                                                                                                                              The computer history museum in Mountain View should host.

                                                                                                                                                          • spread_love · 4 years ago

                                                                                                                                                            This would sell out instantly in Yuppie Brooklyn (I use that term endearingly) at at least $40/ticket.

                                                                                                                                                            The real challenge would be moving it from tour stop to tour stop without breaking it, if I had to guess.

                                                                                                                                                          • Ice_cream_suit · 4 years ago

                                                                                                                                                            So very cool !

                                                                                                                                                            (Pardon my immature gushing, but it really is very, very cool !)

                                                                                                                                                            • Yizahi · 4 years ago

                                                                                                                                                              Pawel is doing amazing work, no questions. But I also like to promote lesser scale projects, like this one for example (only 5 sound sources):

                                                                                                                                                              Floppy Music Robo-Band. Rondo alla Turca (cover) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICMXnnb_xqI

                                                                                                                                                              • AndrianV · 4 years ago

                                                                                                                                                                If you can read any MIDI file, you should seriously consider hosting a twitch broadcast where subscribers may upload their own MIDI files and hear them played live by the floppotron.

                                                                                                                                                                • Gys · 4 years ago

                                                                                                                                                                  I also thought the MIDI makes this complex system very accessible. However:

                                                                                                                                                                  > Even if there is an existing MIDI for a specific song, re-arranging it for The Floppotron is still a time consuming process. Every „instrument” in the setup have its limits and the track must fit the note range it can play. Making a track sound good on the stacks of FDDs or a scanner usually involves a lot of tweaking.

                                                                                                                                                                  > Making one arrangement for 3.0 usually takes me 3-4 evenings, which is a little longer than for the older Floppotron 2.0.

                                                                                                                                                                  Maybe there could be an kind of offline version that people can use to tweak their own MIDI and ultimately play it on the real machine?

                                                                                                                                                                • dbqpdb · 4 years ago

                                                                                                                                                                  This should honestly be in an art gallery

                                                                                                                                                                  • afroisalreadyin · 4 years ago

                                                                                                                                                                    I am in awe of the completeness and entertainment factor of this thing; you have to admire the dedication that went into bringing it to such a level. Probably the most entertaining thing I've ever seen done with computer hardware.

                                                                                                                                                                    • ethanfinni · 4 years ago

                                                                                                                                                                      There should be a special version of a Turing award for fun computing projects like this!