‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ Performed by 3.5-in. Floppy Drives

Looking for something to do with all those old floppy drives you have lying around? Why not combine them with some hard drives and scanners to create an orchestra. That’s what Pawel Zadrozniak did, using the sounds made by the stepper motors running at different speeds in the scanners and drives to recreate the Nirvana class, “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”

Zadrozniak calls his orchestra The Floppotron on his site:

“Every column of 8 floppy drives is connected to one 8-channel controller built on ATMega16 microcontroller. One controller acts as one voice with envelope simulation – the higher the volume, the more drives are playing. This allows to make ADSR-like shape and simulate a musical instrument, like a piano (exponential decay) or string instrument (sine, “vibrato”).”

Learn more on Zadrozniak’s website.