Here's a stunning orchestral arrangement played by HDDs, floppy drives, and scanners

pcgamer.com:

PC music has come to mean a lot nowadays, from the soundtracks of some of the greatest games (Doom, for example) to the record label celebrated for its high-energy hyperpop sound (see: PC Music(opens in new tab)). But what about music made with only PC parts? Show some love to Paweł Zadrożniak, who's recently unveiled the third generation of their orchestra of scanners, floppy disks, and hard drives.

Nicknamed The Floppotron 3.0, this collection of ageing PC parts makes the sweetest sounds in the right hands. Check out the video above for Zadrożniak's rendition of Entrance of the Gladiators, a song that seems entirely fitting when played by such a rabble of old-school apparatus.

There are 512 floppy disk drives, 4 scanners, and 16 hard drives in the orchestra, hooked up to a mainframe of PSUs that draws an average of 300W from the wall, but can peak at a whipping 1,200W. Ouch. Yet a small price to pay for making such sweet, sweet music.

If you look to the back of the floppy disk wall, it's really rather impressive how it's all setup. That's surely a small fortune's worth of cables.

Of course, the Floppotron 3.0 took a long while to build. If you're wondering how it all works, Zadrożniak offers an extensive explanation over on their blog(opens in new tab), which goes into detail about a handful of projects all the way back to 2011.

«Every mechanical device with electric motor or any other moving parts makes noise as a side effect. Sometimes that noise can be controlled. and turned into music—which usually involves some level of abuse. All of the devices present in the 'orchestra' contain either stepper motors or moving heads (in case of hard drives), which are driven by custom electronic circuits—controllers. Those