As a boy growing up in the Yorkshire countryside, one of the regular attractions at local fairs was a massive steam organ: a baroque beast with trumpets, horns and whistles that played classical tunes to the delight of the audience. I don’t know if there are still steam organs, but if they are old, I have a perfect replacement: the floppy cartridge, a giant “PC hardware orchestra” that plays music using only electric motors.

Like a fairground organ, the floppy cartridge isn’t bulky, big, musically complex, and pleasant to look at. This is the work of Polish engineer Paweł Zadrożniak, who has created several iterations of the instrument since 2011. The first Floppotron consisted of just a pair of Star Wars Imperial March drives, but its latest incarnation, the Floppotron 3.0, has a full suite of PC peripherals: 512 floppy drives, 16 hard drives, and four flatbed scanners.

Floppotron’s concept is that electric motors make noise. Precisely set how fast and hard you will run the engine (frequency) and you will be able to create specific notes. Combine enough of these notes and voila, you have your music.

As Zadrozhnyak explains in a detailed blog post on Floppotron 3.0, the system has become incredibly complex. The wall of the floppy drive is arranged in a column, each processing one note at a time, and the number of drivers involved changes the sound shell (how loud or quiet, how much vibrato, etc.). These floppy drives handle low tones, while the scanner section uses larger scanner engines to deliver higher tones. The hard disk assembly completes the percussion section with the punches and clicks emitted by the disk heads moved by the disk platters.

The Floppotron is actually a work of art and I hope Zadrozhnyak continues his work and perhaps inspires some followers. Who knows, maybe 50 years from now, one of Floppotron’s heirs will entertain little kids at the fair, as I am fascinated by steam. Source