When I was a kid growing up in rural Yorkshire, one of the regular attractions at local fairs was a huge steam-powered organ: a baroque monstrosity of pipes, horns, and whistles that would parp out classical tunes to the delight of onlookers. I donât know if steam organs are still a thing, but if theyâve been retired then I have the perfect replacement: the Floppotron â a mammoth âPC hardware orchestraâ that plays music using only electric motors.
Like a fairground organ, the Floppotron is unwieldy, massive, musically unsubtle, and a complete joy to behold. Itâs the work of Polish engineer PaweĹ ZadroĹźniak, whoâs been building various iterations of the instrument since 2011. The first Floppotron consisted of just a pair of floppy drives playing The Imperial March from Star Wars, but its most recent incarnation â Floppotron 3.0 â contains a full orchestra of PC peripherals: 512 floppy disk drives, 16 hard drives, and four flatbed scanners. It is immense.
The concept behind the Floppotron is simply that electric motors make noise. Tune exactly how fast and hard you run the motor (its frequency) and you can produce specific notes. Combine enough of those notes and, voila, you have music.
Image: PaweĹ ZadroĹźniak
The schematic for Floppotron 3.0
As ZadroĹźniak explains in a detailed blog post on the Floppotron 3.0, the system has now become incredibly complex. The floppy disk drive wall is arranged into columns, each of which handles a single note at a time, with the number of drives engaged varying the sound envelope (how loud or soft it is; how much vibrato it has, and so on). These floppy disk drives handle the low tones, while the scanner section uses the scannersâ larger motors to provide the higher pitches. A group of hard disk drives rounds things out as the percussion section, with bangs and clicks enunciated by drive heads moving across disk platters.
The Floppotron is a work of art, really, and I can only hope ZadroĹźniak continues with his work and maybe inspires some imitators, too. Who knows, in 50 yearsâ time, maybe one of Floppotronâs heirs will be entertaining small children at a fair the way steam organs fascinated me.