The engineer assembled an "iron" orchestra from floppy drives

Engineer Pavel Zadrozhnyak posted a video on YouTube with his new development: the Floppotron 3.0 orchestra, which plays old equipment instead of musical instruments. The concept is very simple: electric motors make noise. This means that you can adjust their frequency to play specific notes - and make a melody out of them.

Zadrozhnyak began playing music in such a non-trivial way back in 2011. The first version of the Floppotron, which he built in his spare time from university, consisted of only two drives. She could only play the Imperial March from Star Wars. The Internet liked it: the video scored over 6.7 million views.

The second iteration, which the author introduced to the world in 2016, already consisted of 64 floppy drives, to which were added 8 hard drives and a couple of scanners. Floppotron 3.0 consists of 512 floppy drives, 16 hard drives and 4 scanners.

As Zadrozhniak explained in detail

blog post, the system has become incredibly complex. Each column of floppy drives processes one note at a time, with the number of involved drives changes the envelope of the sound (a graph that determines the volume and other parameters of the sound from time).

These drives handle low tones, while scanners with larger motors handle higher tones. Hard drives add punch and clicks from the heads of the drives as they move across the platters.

The author regularly posted "covers" of popular songs performed by Floppotron 2.0 on his YouTube channel. Probably, in the future, he will demonstrate additional features of the third iteration.

What songs would you like to hear performed like this?