Floppy Drive Music By Emmy Winning Composer

We’ve featured a lot of awesome music made using floppy drives before, but this is the first time we’ve seen it used as the main instrument in a movie score, and by Emmy winning composer [Bear McCreary]. The movie, in this case is alien invasion film, Revolt, but you’ve surely heard Bear’s amazing work in the reimagined Battlestar Galactica series, The Walking Dead, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (my favorite of his), or the one for which he won an Emmy, Da Vinci’s Demons wherein the main theme sounds the same backwards as forwards, to name just a few. So when someone of [Bear]’s abilities makes use of floppy drives, we listen.

[Bear] works with a team, and what they learned was that it’s a clicking sound which the drives make that we hear. It’s just so fast that it doesn’t come across as clicks. The speed at which the clicks are made determines the pitch. And so to control the sound, they control the floppy drives’ speed. They also found that older floppy drives had more of the type of sound they were looking for than newer ones, as if floppy drives weren’t getting hard to find as is. In the end, their floppy orchestra came out to around twelve drives. And the result is awesome, so be sure to check it out in the video below.

As for floppy drive music we’ve covered before, check out the Floppotron which can play [Nirvana]’s Smells Like Teen Spirit, this TI-83+ calculator hacked to play a floppy drive, and the RumbleRail, eight floppy drives each controlled by its own ATMega 16 microcontroller. That last makes us wonder if the next step should be a ten-floppy drive keyboard instrument, you know, one for each finger and thumb.

And since hearing is believing, we just have to include [Bear]’s Da Vinci’s Demons theme song played forward and then backward.

Filed under: Musical Hacks