Presumed dead and now resurrected

Who would have thought that they would ever be good for anything again? For in most offices they had already been replaced, superseded by DVD drives and USB. The era of disk drives seemed to be dead and buried, but now they’re experiencing a rebirth, though in a different form.

They’re now a trend, one that’s been making waves on the internet for some time now: it’s called “floppy music” (named after the old floppy disk drives) which is a pretty apt descriptor for this phenomenon.

With the aid of a microcontroller, several floppy disk drives are linked up, and centrally controlled, so that they then “play” tunes and entire songs. These are suffused with a en entirely new kind of aural charm, but are nonetheless astonishingly easy to recognise – at least when a sufficiently large number of drives are being used.

One of the tinkerers who in their free time reproduce well-known songs and film music is Johannes Reschke. And because at the moment he’s also on a Krones scholarship, I met up with him and talked to him about his hobby.

Actually, he’s studying electrical engineering at the East Bavarian University of Applied Science in Regensburg, and is currently working on his thesis, which deals with CRD visualisation at Krones. He’d known about videos with floppy music for quite a bit already , but up to now he simply hadn’t had the time to have a go at it himself. However, in the last vacations, he had then had an opportunity to explore the intricacies of drive-based crafting – and found he really enjoyed it. What he likes best about it is the “tinkering” aspect. And since Christmas is fast approaching, he’s created a song for our blog reminding us of when we were children – though back then, perhaps, it didn’t sound quite so electronic 😉

Well, do you recognise the song involved?