Many of our readers will remember that there used to be a kind of technology, a bit like a huge, flat, noisy slow USB key that stored less than 2 Megs of data. Not gigs, megs.
So anyway, these were called Floppy Disks (even though they were square and rigid (the actual disk is inside the casing) and the floppy drives that each computer had back in the before time, well they were NEVER ever used to make music like this, except by extreme geeks with too much time on their hands:
The sound comes from getting the disk to “seek” by moving the read/write “head” with its little motor to read different parts of the disk, but moving in a stuttering, stepping fashion. The stuttering speed is fast enough to make a “tone”. The tones can be “played” by (somehow) converting a midi file into commands that cause the floppy drives to move in just the right way when it’s their turn to play the “note”. Freak!
A sad day for technology and innovation, the Edison of our times moves on. A few people have put me on to this speech he made. Advice a lot of us know we should take but not everyone has the courage to make it happen.
Evergreen highschool in the US sent their kids on a field trip to Valve, kids made their own levels, understood the value of working in teams and made some really cool stuff using physics, creative thinking and the latest technology… Better than the zoo?
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