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Musical Organ Created From 49 Floppy Disk Drives
ErnieKey writes: A youth club in Germany, called Toolbox Bodensee, has created an unusual musical organ. It is constructed of 49 floppy disk drives all of which combine to play quite a unique sound. It has the ability to be played manually or act as a playback device. If you have a bunch of old floppy drives and want to assemble your own organ, the 3D print files are available for free download on Thingiverse.
Assembling my organ is not what I usually do with it...
Actually organs are an instrument designed to imitate the sound of a pipe organ. E.g. the electric musical organ, an instrument which has been in common use for over 100 years with no blowing of air required.
Now please take that pedantic organ in your head elsewhere.
49 is the usual number of keys in a four octave keyboard.
It's the number of keys on many smallish keyboards: 4 octaves of notes, usually C2 through C6 inclusive, so 4×12+1=49.
I used to have a proggy that made music with a 5,25 floppy drive on my c=64 back in the '90's.
Bach says it all.
somewhere floating about from ~2010 is a bank of floppies playing the Imperial March...
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
No doubt inspired by this guy, or any number of others like him who've been doing this for several year now.
Though admittedly without the buzzword worthy but otherwise pointless 3D printed plastic brackets.
You can also use it to Bach up your files.
Table-ized A.I.
Organs are defined by their way of operation which works by blowing air into pipes of different length to make a sound. What they built could be best described as an electro-mechanical keyboard (if it even has keys)
"Organ[o]" is a Greek word meaning "Instrument" and, in Greek, a "musical organ" can be any "musical instrument" - the first "musical instrument" that was what is now defined by you "barbarians" (!) as "organ was made by Greeks ("Hydr-a-ylis" - "Hydraylic Pipe [Musical] Organ")
Antisthenes: "Wisdom begins by examining the words/names." - excuse my English, i am (slightly...) better with my Greek!
In a floppy disk drive there is a stepper motor which drive the read/write heads. That mechanism is used in normal operation to select the correct track/cylinder to read from/write to (a floppy drive is much like a modern hard disk drive in that respect, except the information density is way less and the 'disks' are of course portable).
In the instance of this musical instrument/organ it's 'abused' by letting the stepper motor step with the frequency of the tone you want to play. The friction between the read/write heads and the rails they are gliding over makes the whole floppy housing vibrate a bit with the selected frequency. The housing acts as a resonance box and the vibration is transferred to the air where it produces sound waves in a frequency (the same the stepper motor vibrates with), you can hear.
Because the stepper motor doesn't rotate smoothly but in steps (hence its name) the produced sound is rather 'sharp', 'blocky', or whatever you may call it (I have some difficulty here finding the correct musical jargon - English is not my native language). There are a lot of higher harmonics in it.
Maybe if you saw the video in the original article, you noticed some random gaps in some of the notes played, where, if you knew the pieces played (they are rather popular numbers so I'll assume you know at least some of them), you would expect the note to continue. Those are caused because the head has reached the end of the track and now has to reverse (and so does the rotation direction of the stepper motor). That takes a moment in which no 'music' can be played.
Musical floppy drives are made by manipulating the internal motor that moves the read/write heads over the floppy disk. Each floppy disk is divided into 80 tracks radially from the centre, which the notoriously noisy floppy drive motor can send the read/write head to. By pulsing the motor at any of those 80 positions, representing different frequencies, you can create a particular musical note. And, because floppy drives don't contain their own controller, they're far easier to manipulate with third-party boards and tools like the Arduino.
Therefore I think each drive has to be chosen individually because with only 80 total positions the chances of any given drive playing consecutive semitone-spaced correct pitches would be small. So it would seem they've gone through a bunch of drives selecting the ones that have a track position that's nearest to each desired pitch to make up 49 semitone-spaced notes.