Music on a floppy disk drive: theory and examples

Floppy drive - already outlived its device: today, almost no one uses a floppy disk as a carrier of information, because in the course much more convenient and fast ways to disseminate information. Dead loads remain quite workable copies that could be useful for something, for example, to extract music from them.

A disk with a magnetizable surface rotates inside a disk drive with a diskette with a given frequency, and the magnetic head that reads information from it is positioned by a small stepper motor. The whole structure produces a characteristic noise familiar to almost everyone, and by setting its rhythm and tone, you can get a motive of pleasurable musical melodies.
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Floppy disk drives are quite simple: they get the command when to rotate the disk, when to read or write, and how far to move the magnetic head. Using ready-made pin patterns , any control device and a recorded music algorithm, it is possible to get as many voice polyphony as many disk drives are used.

Notes for playing on drives are set by the speed of movement of the magnetic head, as a rule, the MIDI recording of the desired melody is used. To play on multiple drives, you need to break notes for devices, and in this case, preparing the MIDI files manually is the best solution.

It should be noted, however, that devices can easily be corrupted, that different drives will have different tonality depending also on their relative position and presence inside the diskette, that the tonality will have to be set programmatically and that it may differ even during the same game.

Michael Cohn implemented the Bach Invention No. 13 game on a single disk drive controlled by an ATmega168 controller. On the project page, the author provides very detailed descriptions of the scheme of work and the source code of programs.



A microcontroller is not always necessary to create such music: a regular graphical calculator is enough. With only two I / O connectors from the TI-83 +, Kerm Martian made one drive work. The project page contains the description and source codes of the modified calculator media player.



The project called (d) iskette (o) rgan george whiteside is based on two 3½ "and two 5½" drives and is controlled by a PIC18f14k50 microcontroller that plays any MIDI on a floppy drive connected via USB. Creation information and source codes are provided on the project page .



Unknown to the nickname Devils Child played using five disk drives and Arduino Uno, the tune of the song Nyanyanyanyanyanyanya, better known as the musical theme of Nyan-Cat. On the project page, the author provided a description and source codes of management programs.



You can find much more records on the Internet, sometimes using up to 8 disk drives . Potential ideas quite allow you to play even such complex melodies as “ Flight of the Bumblebee ” on only 4 disk drives.