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The Floppy Drive in a Musical Context Essay

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1.1 Mechanism of a “musical” floppy drive The floppy drive itself is musical in a certain way depending on what people may perceive as musical such as the sound of friction. In my project, the floppy drive makes sounds through pitched notes due to friction between the read-write head and the diskette. It produces notes since the diskette has contact friction with read write head, in revolution. Recall that sine waves can be viewed as the progression of a circle over time, or a revolution. Spinning at higher speeds increases the pitch and also the frequency. The spindle motor spins the floppy drive at a certain speed controlled by the microcontroller. Then, read write head will be positioned on the diskette with a drive motor that will…show more content…
In resume, we produce sound by using a floppy drive, a computer and a microcontroller. Simply convert properly and if there is contact between the read write head and the diskette itself, it will produce an audible pitch. 1.2 The use of floppy drive music in musical context Floppy music is quite good to listen to in my opinion. However, some might consider it as not musical due its lack of musical characteristic as the floppy drive was not invented to be a musical instrument but a disk reader. It also does not make any musical association with most people since floppy drives are associated with computers and electronics. The contexts where this type of instrument might be considered “musical” in my opinion would be the internet, a creative project and certain performances. It has never been used formally as an instrument, however, due to the tesla coils success in concerts, I speculate that introducing floppy drive music would be a success since most YouTube videos with a musical floppy drive have pretty high number of views and critics have been grateful the singing tesla coils. Musical diskette readers should be possible since there are a few bands that try to implement a new experience in the audience by using new instruments that are not associated with music like tesla coils. It turns out to be accepted by a restricted to a limited
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