wax&wires

Floopy Drive Music

Just last week, I was re-purposing an old PC to use as an Ubuntu Boxee box (overrated thus far). I was digging around in the guts and unhooked the floppy drive thinking, who uses these?!

Little did I know that it wasn’t my 3.5″ friend that was obsolete, but simply my way of thinking about him.

Here, CircuitGirl (Jeri Ellsworth) wins the hearts of music geeks everywhere by hacking an old cassette deck and floppy drive to make a weird little audio recorder that produces an interesting reverb sound… then she scratches it ftw.

I remember the big fat 5″ disks we had at my elementary school, the boxes of blanks my dad had on his computer desk, and the sheer number of disks you had to load up just to play a game as simple as Math Blaster. It’s a bit weird and nostalgic to me to think that you could still actually walk into Fry’s and buy a floppy drive, but you’d be pretty hard pressed to get a Zip or Jazz drive anywhere but ebay. The iomega formats rose and fell all within the lifespan of the old school floppy, and here we see the floppy kicking strong in a bent up sort of way.

For those of you that don’t know Jeri Ellsworth, she’s the same self-taught programmer that crammed 30 games (with a C64 chip) into a joystick to make those little retro direct-to-tv joystick gaming devices that were all the rage a few years back (you can see one in the pic, thanks NYTimes).

Keep your eyes on fatmanandcircuitgirl.com to see what else she hacks up. There’s actually a few music-related videos on there.

Feel free to geek out.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 27th, 2009 at 12:13 pm. It is filed under wires and tagged with cassette, circuit bending, computers, effects, hacks, video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.