I loved this. This fit's perfectly with Stallman definition of hacking [1].
composing a funny joke or a beautiful piece of music may well involve
playful cleverness, but a joke as such and a piece of music as such
are not hacks, however funny or beautiful they may be. However, if the
piece is a palindrome, we can say it is a hack as well as music; if it
is empty, we can say it is a hack on music
Playing The Eye of the Tiger per se is not hacking. Playing it with a dot matrix printer is. In its purest form. :)
That's pretty impressive. Printer music goes way back, by the way. Here's a (low-quality) recording of a 1960s-era IBM 1401 mainframe playing the Blue Danube Waltz on a 1403 line printer: http://www.apropos-logic.com/1403music/1403_blue_danube.mp3
And here's the 1401 playing tunes on a radio via RF interference from the core memory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPk8MVEmiTI
Unfortunately the 1401 at the Computer History Museum isn't currently authorized for line printer music because the stress might destroy the print chain and they don't have a replacement.
A fantastic band called Tree Wave [1], from Austin, used a dot matrix printer as a synth [2] in a bunch of their music [3] around 10 years ago. It's pretty fantastic stuff. Paul Slocum whom lead the group did some amazing work hacking together instruments from Commodore 64s and Atari 2600, going as far as writing and building a custom synth cart for an Arari [4]
I used to work with a guy who did this with food sorting machines. You've never heard Britney Spears' "Hit Me Baby" until you've heard it played on 192 air valves.
Looks like printer was actually modified to achieve this. Now it's much less interesting...
An Atmega8 and an FPGA are connected to various parts of the original printer main board. The Atmega handles the incoming MIDI messages, communicates with the FPGA and drives the stepper motors for the print head and paper feed. The FPGA is configured to generate lots of pulse-width modulation signals with independent frequency and duty cycle to drive the individual printer pins.
Electric motors and speakers are basically the same things. Speakers are optimized to be more efficient at producing sound, motors are optimized to be more efficient at moving things, but at the core, they're the same device.
>> Electric motors and speakers are basically the same things. Speakers are optimized to be more efficient at producing sound, motors are optimized to be more efficient at moving things, but at the core, they're the same device.
Not only that, you can superimpose audio on the intended operation of the motor by putting the signal on the "D axis" which produces no torque. Unless you're in field weakening blah blah blah... But only higher frequencies are typically possible.
This is cool but my favorite all time video in this genre is "Big Ideas (don't get any)" on Vimeo https://vimeo.com/1109226 In addition to driving a number of pieces of old equipment in unintended ways to make the sound the video is also very artfully done.
It reminds me of the old HP ScanJets, which came with SCSI commands to play musical notes[0] (someone at HP must have had too much free time on his hands ;)). Some videos of the scanners are at [1] and [2].
Another interesting hardware hack to produce music is the "hard drive speaker". You can see some of them in action in a rendition of Radiohead's "Big Ideas: don't get any" [3], as well as various printers and other devices used for their auditive side effects.
I'm not sure if you meant to convey a judgement relative quality. I think that the this video is more impressive than 8 floppy drives. I never thought a single printer would be capable of that tonal quality and that range of polyphonics. I don't mean to hate on MrSolidSnake745 though, his videos are dope.
A loudspeaker is nothing but a coil, a magnet and a piece of cardboard and it too is capable of incredible tonal quality and a huge range of polyphonics.
Brings back the memories from high school time, when I was helping my father in his accounting office. I was able to recognize the document being printed just by the sound pattern the printer was making :)
Wish someone came up with this like 20 years ago when these printers were prevalent. Imagine a virus that would make printers do this. Where is my time machine.
What's the deal with modern dot matrix printers? I very, very rarely need to print anything. What I want from a printer is somewhat legible text and ultra-reliability with low operating costs.
A couple years ago my consumer grade b/w laser printer died after five years of rather infrequent use. I decided I'd rather just take a USB stick to commercial printers than ever shell out for some consumer grade piece of crap again. Might a modern dotmatrix be cheap and super reliable? Like, I can buy it and plan on it working for the next 20 years?
The only downside to dot matrix is the noise and low resolution - otherwise they are extremely reliable, high-throughput printers that are still used extensively in various industrial and other niche environments. The ability to print lines or even individual characters as the data comes in and use continuous feed paper is not possible with inkjets or lasers.
Operating costs are relatively low but they are definitely NOT cheap to purchase.
Occasionally, you can find one on craigslist or at a yard sale for a couple of bucks. They're pretty much indestructable, and printer ribbons can be found online.
I used to work as a service rep at an airline. We used these things extensively for printing airline tickets. These tickets had four red carbon-copy type pages that needed to be printed at once, and a dot-matrix printer is the only thing that handeled this well. It was a small office and we had just a rickety old Star Gemini II printer, but I must have printed thousands of tickets with it before it was decomissioned when e-tickets made their entrance.
I'm seeing, like, $160 for a consumer BW laser and $330 for a dot matrix. Considering the BW laser will probably die inside four years for no good reason, and refills will be about $60, the dot matrix doesn't strike me as expensive if it will last.
[1] https://stallman.org/articles/on-hacking.html