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Symphony For Dot Matrix Printers
nico_DNS writes: ""The Symphony for dot matrix printers is a work which transforms obsolete office technology into an instrument for musical performance. The Symphony focuses the listener's attention on a nearly forgotten technology: the dot-matrix printer. Specifically, it employs the noises the printers make as the sole sound source for a musical composition. Leaving the constituent elements untouched, the process imposes a new order upon them, reorganizing the sounds along a musical structure. ""
Yow! Just imagine
Beowulf cluster of these!
(Ouch! Karma deathwish.)
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You are in a twisty little maze of open source licenses, all different.
set scanner to SCSI ID #0
boot system while holding down Scan button
you will hear "Ode to Joy" as Beethoven intended it-with the scan motor's whine :)
It would be even cooler if it used other computer noises... typing, fan noise, HD grinding (fsck), monitor degausing(sp?), ink jet, mouse clicks... on second thought maybe that would just sound like my office...
YouTube & Google Video -> podcast http://castcluster.blogspot.com/
Unfortunately, no. It appears to be Slashdotted.
...phil
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
I can hardly wait. Now if they would only add a daisy-wheel percussion section, we'd be all set.
This tagline is copyrighted material. Please send $10 for an affordable replacement.
Such as a permanent logging facility.
/var/log/secure, /var/log/messages, or any of your other favourite logs to the line printer.
Send the outputs of
Hard logs. Good securrity. Hackers: Try erasing these puppies. Better bring a lighter!
Now, Dot Matrix printers to Music would be interesting. They could probably use a few old DEC line printers for good bass.
Later models (24 pin) would be good for higher-pitch sounds.
I suppose old 'typewriter like' printers don't count?
There is something extremely peaceful and soothing to these songs. I looped them back-to-back for an hour or so, and I swear it was among the most transcendant experiences I've had this year.
They also have a distinct 20th century edginess to them; whoever arranged these had quite the mastery of rhythm. ;-)
Free music from Jack Merlot.
I can hear it now. Beethoven's symphony in Screech-Major.
Other uses of old dot matrix printers include:
Cheap alarm clock alternative
80 movie props
prop doors open
small boat anchor
I remember reading _years_ ago (when dot matrix printers weren't obsolete equipment!) about someone writing a concerto for dot-matrix printer and orchestra. Even got it performed with a real orchestra. Basically the printer starts out just making noises and attempting to get in on the musical act, and by the end of the piece it is harmonising with the rest of the orchestra. The piece finishes with a wild dot-matrix printer cadenza!
Anyone know any more about this? I've tried a couple of web searches but not found anything. We are talking about 10 years ago if I recall right.
Baz
(by stabbing them over and over again... for several minutes... in the same location... with almost imperceptible variations to my rhythm... until those listening to the murder would fall into a trance-like state of understanding the structure of what I am doing.)
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
This is all out of Steven Levy's excellent book "Hackers: Heroes of The Computer Revolution." Most of it is available online here.
I remember using the tape drive switch on a BBC B microcomputer to make music and you could even make it make speech-like noises of you clicker it on and off at the right frequency.
:)
It was a fairly heavy duty switch but one had to replace them every now and then doing that...
:)
The BBC would also sing to you as it operated, you could tell what it was doing by the electronic noises it made
Troc
Troc's dubious podcast and blog: http://www.trocnet.net
It's the new TLD for cyberscifi and classical music.
Coolasmovie.matrix , Wagner.matrix
And they thought jello could start fires....
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+&x
I downloaded these and listened to them a few days ago.
Unfortunately, the MP3's on the web site seem to be just short excerpts of the the whole symphony.
Now, I listen to a lot of music, from classical to rock to various electronica. I was impressed by this - I had expected it to be kind of a gimmick, or kind of a joke. But what I heard actually sounded musically interesting. Better than a lot of modern music, anyway. If I saw the whole thing available on CD I would buy it.
Your opinion, of course, may vary.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox
mirror here
When I was little ( i.e. when I was 30 yrs. old in 1977) , there was a program that did this on an HP 2108 CPU with a paper tape reader. I don't remember the tune now tho'...
Sinan
Well, if we're gonna talk about non-printers making music, then I may as well plug my VT100 Oddities page, since a VT100 can make music too. Sort of.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
And I thought my printer only hummed because it didn't know the words...
Now if only they could synchronize your hard drives to the printer music, so you could get a higher range. Throw in the fans and the modem and you could do a quartet.
We never did do it, though.
--jdp Maintainer of VisEmacs
Dot-matrix nearly forgotton? Not quite. It may not be used too much on the desktop anymore but dot-matrix printers are still very widely used for largescale print jobs. The company I work for has several very large Printek and IBM dot-matrix printers used for printing invoices, house bills, and ton's of other stuff off our AS/400. Nothing else can match their speed or flexability. Nothing can top them when it comes to printing on forms. It just pumps out hundreds of them out nonstop for hours. Many of them have multiple tractors allowing different types of forms to be printed on a single printer without changing paper. Printek's new printers are capable of doing barcoding on dot-matrix. Dot-matrix technology is developing, not disapearing.
Yes, I remember that well. I'm pretty sure it was by a Winnipeg native composer by the name of Victor Davies. He also did a symphony using car horns, which I saw performed on TV once. Very well done, very musical.
A small description of that concert is available here.
Victor Davies' website is at http://www.goodmedia.com/vdavies/. I recommend you check some of his music out. He is a phenominal composer.
"Free beer tends to lead to free speech"
From "Mechanical Music Digest(tm) Archives":
http://www.foxtai l.com/Archives/Digests/199812/1998.12.15.09.html
Except that was probably someone trying to do a cannon shot...
(Also from the same source): Introduction & Line Printer Music.
Since I can't seem to find anything really good on line printer music, I'll share some anecdotes which were shared with me.
The "chain" on line printers (which holds the letters) used to have all the characters in ASCII (or EBCDIC, I presume) order. Notably, A-Za-z was present in unadulterated form. The problem with this is that anyone printing A-Za-z (interpolate for yourself, please) would fire 52 solenoids at once, frequently blowing the power supply (Or as mentioned in an article linked above) firing the chain out of the printer. The solution was to move the characters around the chain and have the printer translate by means of a lookup table (presumably). In any case, some people did go through the effort to figure out where the characters had been moved to on some printers, but this effectively killed line printer music. How do you do a good cannon shot without being able to fire them all at once?
In any case, it's much the same as using a dot matrix printer; You fire off combinations of characters to generate different sounds. The thing here is that making music with line printers dates from the early seventies if not sooner; Since I'm from the late seventies, it predates me. People were making music with line printers before dot matrix printers existed.
It's worthwhile to never forget your roots.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Are they going to use C# for the programming? It seems oddly appropriate.
Quick, hide! They're arming themselves with fruits and vegetables!
Sheesh, what a loud thing! In fact, I used it during my whole four years in college (1994-1998). My roommates and neighbors could hear it! Haha!
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
One of my dorm-mates once used his dot-matrix printer to get back at some rudeness on his roomie's part. Said roomie had stayed on the phone till about 2 AM arguing with his girlfriend, and my friend was trying to get some sleep before an 8 AM exam. Didn't work out too well.
So my friend waits till a night when the roomie comes home drunk. He lets the roomie sleep for about an hour, then sends a half-megabyte text file to the printer.
All bolded.
With the printer set to half-speed mode.
That was the last time the roomie kept my friend needlessly awake.
Aero
We can believe in you for 3 minutes, but beyond that, even the King of All Cosmos can't be expected to wait.
Take a look at this story from The Payphone Project!
How long before someone figures out how to stick a MIDI port and hardware on it for fun MIDI action? I can see it now...
"Why are you hooking your printer up to your SoundBlaster MIDI port?"
"To make it sound better."
Does anybody out there have a copy of LONE.EXE? I have searched for it on the web in vain.
This was a program that played "The Lone Ranger" music through the PC speaker. The really impressive thing about it was that it was supposedly written on a pre-PC computer that used a similar instruction set and architecture to Intel (can anybody cite an example of that?).
Anyway, another really impressive thing about this program was that it was only 4k for something like 5 minutes or more of music, albeit in an electronic sounding format. I had a copy of this on my old 286, and I saved the hard drive. Unfortunately, it used an interface standard that predated ISA. I've been told it's possible to adapt the drive, but I have neither the time nor the money to look into it, and it may not be on there anyway.
This is also of some historical interest, as it is possibly one of the earliest "PC music" programs. It may even be 25 years old or more, so until I find it, I'll just have to make sure that nothing damages the old hard drive because it may be a "historical artifact".
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Years ago (1970's) I heard a computer play Rimsky-Korsakov's "The Flight of the Bumblebee" at a museum of science in Paris. The audio device was a cheap AM transitor radio held close to a mainframe.
This computer normally emitted radio waves during operation, and the "program" that was running during the demonstration was written especially to emit radio waves that played "The Flight of the Bumblebee".
Correct -- these things have been around for ages. I first saw chain printer music demos on an IBM 360 in 1966, and they were already old and famous at that time. In roughly that same time frame I saw an IBM 1401 program which played music through a radio sitting on the CPU cabinet. I saw the CDC device referenced in the article some years later, but I believe it worked via a third mechanism. I think a speaker was hard wired to a D/A converter fed from one of the CPU registers.
If you were inhumanly patient and had a decent ear, you could write programs in FP Basic that would make an Apple II+ play tones out of the speaker. I remember a popular tune at our ComputerLand franchise was Bach's "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring."
"How many light bulbs does it take to change a person?" --BMcC-->
Not everyone has a strict code review process for every little bit of code that goes into a product. I suspect the environment at Microsoft development is a lot less rigid than a lot of people would initially think. You gotta realize that if you turn everything into a huge formal production, you'll never get anything done. And Microsoft has really been spewing in recent years, so I can't imagine a whole lot of formal code review going on.
I myself added an easter egg to a program I've worked on (not at Microsoft). A Mandelbrot generator in an RTF print preview program doesn't take that much space. One other developer has found it for himself (in the code) in the 1.5 years the code has been out... and that's because of the blatantly obvious out-of-place "mandel.c"... sticking out right there in SourceSafe. I did it because, at the time, I had nothing better to do, and have always wanted to make an easter egg in a commercial product.
Silly me, I forgot the point of easter eggs (at least the Microsoft ones you see) and neglected to even include my name.
BTW, Ctrl-Alt-Shift-NumPad*
One of the most vivid memories I have of my C64 is a little program which played "kung fu fighting", in clear AM quality audio. It was amazing for its time, I could hardly believe it.
-- iCEBaLM
at the end of 'ringfinger' (the last track on 'pretty hate machine') there is a twisted guitar (that's what i've heard it claimed to be) which sounds almost exactly like a dot matrix.
to me anyway..
...dave
Think different? I'd be happy if most people would just think...
Symphony for Dot Matrix?
Man-oh-man, it must be Friday, 'cuz I read something totally different
Sympathy for Dot Matrix
(to the tune of "Sympathy for the Devil" By Mick Jagger/Keith Richards)
Please allow me to introduce myself
I'm a past that you must face
I've been around for a long, long year
Stole many a man's soul and faith
I was around when TRS-80s
Had their moment of dubious fame
Made Damn sure that Tandy
Washed their hands and sealed your fate.
CHORUS
Pleased to meet you
Hope you guess my name
But what's puzzling you
Is the nature of my game
I stuck around in adding machines
When the computer saw the time to change
I handled carbons and NCR's
As the lasers screamed in vain
Built like a tank
Held a general's rank
When line printers raged
And the toner stank
CHORUS
I watched with glee
While compatibility
and the price you paid
Were the laser's grave
You always knew
What screwed your CRT
It was EMI
From the DMP
Let me please introduce myself
I'm a past that you must face
And I'm the best for preprinted forms
That can't be filled in any other way
CHORUS
Just as every box is a terminal
Most of your print queue is text
I'm noisy as Hell
Just call me Lucifer
'Cause for some jobs I'm still the best
So if you meet me
Have some courtesy
Have some sympathy, and some taste
Use all your well-learned politesse
Or I'll lay your forms to waste.
CHORUS
Tell me baby, what's my name
Tell me honey, baby guess my name
Tell me baby, what's my name
Tell you one time, you're to blame
Ooo, who -- Ooo, who -- Ooo, who -- Ooo, who -- who
Ooo, who -- Ooo, who -- Ooo, who -- Ooo, who -- who
Oh, yeah
What's my name
Tell me, baby, what's my name
Tell me, sweetie, what's my name
Ooo, who -- Ooo, who -- Ooo, who -- Ooo, who -- who
Ooo, who -- Ooo, who -- Ooo, who -- Ooo, who -- who
Oh, yeah
If you can go to bed, knowing you did a valuable thing today, you're very lucky. If you can't... it's not bedtime
The HP ScanJet 4C actually came with a program called 'Jukebox' (i think?) that played ode to joy, when the saints come marching in, and a few other similar songs. I think it had a total of 5 tunes (quite a jukebox!) and it froze the rest of the computer while using it, but everyone always got a kick out of hearing the scanner buzz out 'It's a Small World' with its scan head motor.
:)
Quite interesting. I tried to figure out the file format, but to no avail... I think if I could feed MIDI files to my scanner, I wouldn't need any MP3's!
jason
They were testing the hardware drivers, and they were ready ahead before anyone else needed their section.
The radio on top of the CPU cabinet was just picking up RFI on the AM channel. There is no wired connection into the computer. You could also get music by putting an AM radio next to a HP programable calculator and running a program.
Your wallet stays open. Our source remains closed. We are MSFT
Make a beautiful musical team. Just watch out for head knocking on the 1541.
Hands in my pocket
You know, *every* time someone here on Slashdot talks about an old freeware or public-domain program for the PC and how they wish they still had it, I've found the program within about 5 minutes.
Hey, all you nostalgics! Go here:
OAK Software Repository
Right from the main page, go to the section called PC/Blue Disk Library, and go to the PCBLUE subdirectory. Then download the big master index (pbcat.zip). Find the archive file that holds the software you're looking for (trust me, they're all in there), and enjoy!
In your particular case, you're thinking of the "PianoMan" software. There were actually many, many different tunes available with that program, not just the William Tell Overture (a.k.a. the Lone Ranger's theme song). The PianoMan program had the ability to generate COM files from the included music (MUS) files. That's why the Lone Ranger song got distributed so much more than the entire PianoMan package.
Rest assured, if you download Volume 216 from the above archive, and then spend about 2 minutes reading the PianoMan documentation, you'll be able to re-generate that Lone Ranger tune/program.
I watched Cube the other day, and noticed that the soundtrack featured either a dot matrix printer or a really good simulation. I was idly thinking that it would be neat to a whole piece based on it, but these guys have obviously beat me to the punch.
I also have a Graphtec X-Y plotter, which makes neat sounds, especially from programmatically generated images, such as a cardioid. I've been hacking it to do pencil and watercolor images, with promising results.
Oh well, back to paid hacking now.
LILO boot: linux init=/usr/bin/emacs
When I was in high school in 1981, we had a "computer room" which was a classroom with four DecWriter II terminals and 300 baud acoustic modems. (Knocking on the side of the modem to get line noise was fun all in itself!)
They had this program they would run every now and then (like during lunch hour) which generated endless pages of math problems (like four digit addition, two digit multiplication, etc.) for the remedial math students. At 300 baud, the program made this unmistakable sound between the digits (with one or two spaces in between) and the lines under the problems. skritch, skritch, skritch, skritch, thunkswoosh, skritch, skritch, skritch, skritch, thunkswoosh, bzzzzz, bzzzzz, bzzzzz, bzzzzz, thunkunkunkswoosh...
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Then they can write a script whose only goal is to create the most verbose log messages. As someone else said, it's hard to grep a stack of paper. But it's even harder to do it when someone is deliberately making your job harder by diluting the stream.
Good thing I read all the way through the responses before I posted about this. I remember this vaguely from the 80's. My maniacal best friend told me about them, along with his copy protection breaking software.
Anybody remember "Impossible Mission?"
bun-fhuinneog agam!
You might be interested to know that Man or Astroman? are using the same trick on their new album, in a track called -- fittingly, A Simple Text File. Supposedly there's an mp3 of it laying around, but I haven't heard it yet.
Friends of mine are all into this kind of music. I remember hearing about one that did more or less the same as this dot matrix stuff, only with a room full of hard drives and very precisely accessed text files & a bit of perl magic. If you find this sort of thing interesting, you might want to listen to (void).mp3 by Alex MacLean, which was 100% generated with a perl script and the logs of a mailing list, and generative.net, where people that are in to this sort of stuff congregate and exchange ideas about what art really is. All very fascinating stuff...
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
At last! Lotus releases a version of Symphony that works with dot matrix printers, not just those Selectric-style line printers! Now I can use the spreadsheet-that's-a-graph-and-word-processor-too to print out my love letters, pie charts, AND budget projections! I've been waiting for a new version since before Prince was The Artist Formerly Known As!
One important question: do you need an 80386SX computer with 1MB of RAM to run it? Otherwise I'm out of luck. Blasted MS-DOS 3.3! What if I run Desqview -- is it Quarterdeck certified? It doesn't conflict with Sidekick or other TSRs, I hope. Can't live without those.
I hope it fits on a single app floppy. I hate having to swap floppies just to run a program. 720K ought to be big enough for anything.
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lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}