About
Floppy Disk Drive Music Videos are videos in which musicians orchestrate multiple floppy disk drives to perform well-known songs in the style of glitch music.
Origin
One of the first floppy disk drive music videos was posted to YouTube on September 16th, 2007 by drbpony. Titled “The Singing 1541 Floppy Drive,” the video showed a Commodore 64 floppy disk drive playing a programmed tune.
Spread
In June 2008, a video of a floppy disk playing the Imperial March from Star Wars (shown below, left) was featured on Hack A Day[11], Today and Tomorrow[12], Think Artificial[13], Buzzfeed[14] and Make Magazine.[15] The next year, artist Mike Kohn[5] launched a section on his personal site to exhibit his floppy drive music work (shown below, left), featuring Bach’s Invention 13.
In 2011, tutorials on how to make these orchestrated floppy drive sounds appeared on Locker Gnome[8] and Lifehacker.[1] Additionally, Geekosystem[4] featured a different Imperial March video by Pawel Zadrożniak (shown below, left) made by students at the Polish AGH University of Science and Technology in September 2011. The next month, YouTuber MrSolidSnake749[10] launched his floppy disk music video channel with his version of the Imperial March (shown below, right). In 2012, another tutorial appeared on Instructables[7] while Techeblog[6] and Make Use Of[2] curated lists of floppy disk music videos.
Notable Examples
As of February 2013, there are more than 6800 search results for “floppy drive” on YouTube.[9]
Search Interest
External References
[1]Lifehacker – Make Music with a Floppy Disk Drive
[2]Make Use Of – 8 Of The Best Floppy Disk Drive Music Videos
[3]Geekosystem – The Doctor Who Theme, Played on Floppy Drives [Video]
[4]Geekosystem – Two Hacked Floppy Disk Drives Playing Star Wars’ Imperial March [Video]
[5]Mike Kohn – Floppy Music
[6]Techeblog – 5 Famous Songs Recreated with Floppy Drives, Disks
[7]Instructables – How to Make Musical Floppy Drives
[8]LockerGnome – How to Make Music Using Floppy Drives
[9]YouTube – Search results for “floppy drive”
[10]YouTube – MrSolidSnake745’s channel
[11]Hack A Day – More hardware music
[12]Today and Tomorrow – Hardware Music
[13]Think Artificial – Music Played With Floppy Drives and Other CompSci Hardware
[14]Buzzfeed – Disk Drive Music