This PC orchestra, built from 512 floppy disk drives, is wondrous to hear and behold
by James Vincent from The Verge - All Posts on (#60DWT)
When I was a kid growing up in rural Yorkshire, one of the regular attractions at local fairs was a huge steam-powered organ: a baroque monstrosity of pipes, horns, and whistles that would parp out classical tunes to the delight of onlookers. I don't know if steam organs are still a thing, but if they've been retired then I have the perfect replacement: the Floppotron - a mammoth PC hardware orchestra" that plays music using only electric motors.
Like a fairground organ, the Floppotron is unwieldy, massive, musically unsubtle, and a complete joy to behold. It's the work of Polish engineer Pawe Zadroniak, who's been building various iterations of the instrument since 2011. The first Floppotron consisted of just a pair of floppy drives p...