Listen to 16 Floppy Drives Work in Concert to Produce Beautiful Music

All electric motors make noise as they spin, thanks to the vibrations they produce. Stepper motors are especially noticeable as a result of the way they’re constructed, with a notched rotor that “steps” between multiple stators inside of the housing, as opposed to simply spinning freely like a standard DC motor. Noisy stepper motors are a bit of a fact of life, but many drivers on the market do a good job of reducing the volume as much as possible. Sometimes, however, that sound is actually desirable. YouTuber Gigawipf took advantage of the stepper motors inside 16 floppy disk drives to form a musical symphony.

When a stepper motor turns, it isn’t spinning smoothly. Even if it’s is rotating at a constant rate, the rotor is actually snapping from one stator to the next. That means it is actually turning just a degree or two at a time, and each of those steps makes a bit of noise. As the motor turns faster, the time between steps decreases. This results in an increased frequency, which corresponds to the pitch of the note that the motor is “playing.” By precisely controlling the rotation speed of stepper motors, you can play whatever notes you desire. Each stepper motor is capable of producing a single voice, and these can be layered to create polyphonic music.

Floppy disk drives, like hard disk drives, contain two motors. The spindle motor’s job is to spin the magnetic disk, where data is stored, at a consistent speed. A stepper motor is used to move the read/write head across the disk. It’s that stepper motor that is producing the notes. In this case, Gigawipf has 16 of them to work with, which means 16 different notes can be played simultaneously. These drives don’t need to actually do any reading or writing, so Gigawipf was able to control all of their stepper motors with an Arduino Due board. The Arduino accepts a MIDI input and assigns new notes to whichever drives are not currently being used. All 16 of the floppy drives were packed into a single sturdy case, with the USB and power connections on the outside. This lets Gigawipf haul the entire setup to shows, and it can even be played with the case closed as the music reverberates through the enclosure.