Are you ready to meet a huge “PC hardware orchestra” that plays music using only electric motors, aka the system called Floppotron? The Floppotron might seem bulky, gigantic, musically sleazy, but it’s certainly a joy to watch. This instrument originated with the work of Polish engineer Paweł Zadrożniak, who has built several iterations of it since 2011.
The first Floppotron consisted of just a pair of floppy drives playing The Imperial March from Star Wars, but its latest version, Floppotron 3.0, contains a full orchestra of PC peripherals: 512 floppy drives, 16 hard disk drives and four browsers.
The concept behind Floppotron can simply be explained as electric motors making noise. It is possible to produce certain notes by precisely adjusting how fast and hard you run the engine (frequency). When you bring together enough of these notes, music emerges. The system has now become incredibly complex, as
Zadrożniak explained in a detailed blog post on Floppotron 3.0. The floppy drive wall is organized in columns, with the number of drives each processing a single note at a time, changing the envelope (how loud or soft it is; how much vibrato it has). These floppy drives are used to reproduce low tones, while the tuner section uses the tuners’ larger engines to deliver higher pitches. A group of hard disk drives complete the orchestra by creating the percussion section with bangs and clicks created by the drive heads moving along the disk platters.
Floppotron is truly a work of art and we hope Zadrożniak continues his work.
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