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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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!)?
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.
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:
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 :)
A demo, including music and graphics, written for the 1541 disk drive -- no, it is not a C64 demo, it runs entirely on the 1541 (which has a 6502 CPU and some amount of RAM in it)
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.
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:
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.
"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.
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.
This is brilliant! It reminds me of the anecdote Steven Levy relates in Hackers about Steve Dompier of the Homebrew Computer Club writing a program for the Altair that created music through electrical interference[0]. Awesome!
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
131 comments
[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 199 ms ] threadI 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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ar9WRwCiSr0
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLRdruqQfRk
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.
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.
Harder Drive is one of my favorite videos.
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.
And yes, Tom7 is a frequent contributor :)
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
More singing:
- https://youtu.be/llBI_L21d3g
- https://www.reddit.com/r/trains/comments/ilxxt7/these_trains...
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.
Edit: :P
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 . . .
Probably just hard won knowledge that almost no one else would ever have.
Kind of cool in a way.
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.
https://youtu.be/mbhQ36bd870
A demo, including music and graphics, written for the 1541 disk drive -- no, it is not a C64 demo, it runs entirely on the 1541 (which has a 6502 CPU and some amount of RAM in it)
This is the stuff of legends, nice work Paweł!
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.
Very happy to see this.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers%3A_Heroes_of_the_Compu...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EPmWvqZ0Rw
Also, why didn't he use any SSDs? (j/k)
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!
Oh, that? We just ignore it. They call it technical debt.
We learnt to ignore it in a few months, but it's funny when guests hear it for the first time.
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.
That's pretty much what computer graphics programming is.
I’ve noodled around with it a bit, and it’s pretty cool.
>a friendly tutorial
>54,019 words 307,466 characters
it's basically a flat file docs
https://twitter.com/search?q=%23d3brokeandmadeart
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.