I remember vividly the range of sounds a floppy drive could generate back in the day. It's high time somebody put this musical potential to good use :)
While the C source formatting is rather horrible, the resulting playback instrument is absolutely impressive. I almost fell from my chair laughing.
The idea for this dates back some years however, the first one I remember is a scanner playing Für Elise [0], and of course there is the Imperial March performed by three floppy drives [1].
There is also another performance (Bach's Toccata & Fugue) using eight floppies [2].
The sounds the drives produce are reminiscent of bowed strings, especially the one playing the bassline. It would be very cool to connect this to a midi controller and play it live.
That's very impressive. I saw this video recently that shows how to turn an old hard drive into a speaker (it works of a wav form, not midi though) with some simple tricks:
What is the song he/she is playing? I wonder how the original sounds. Some of the channels sound rather muddy. Maybe something could be done to align upstrokes and downstrokes?
Adding in additional abstractions would probably be unnecessary overhead for an embedded system. The code the author wrote, while a bit repetitive, maps fairly straightforwardly to assembly.
And one of my favorites from another artist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZGgymGg0Ns