Listen to the sounds of your data

Computers & Mobile Music
Listen to the sounds of your data
harddrive1.jpg

This project by artist Greg Chatonsky generates sound from vibration sensors placed on the exterior of a defective computer hard disk. The amount of vibration is picked up and changed to sound in real-time though a program written in Pure Data on the PC. The sounds (at the link below) are pretty amazing considering their source.

My Hard Drive is Experiencing Some Strange Noises,
via Neural

4 thoughts on “Listen to the sounds of your data

  1. Spikenzie says:

    Hmm, is it just me but I don’t hear anything?

  2. morcheeba says:

    The Apple II used software to read the individual bytes off the floppy… now that’s all done by the hard disk controller, so it’s not as transparent. I wrote a program that would read the disk drive data and send it to the speaker – you could slightly hear different data on different disks, and you could definitely tell from the sound if the disk drive door was open (the read head wouldn’t be touching the disk in that case).

Comments are closed.

Discuss this article with the rest of the community on our Discord server!

ADVERTISEMENT

Maker Faire Bay Area 2023 - Mare Island, CA

Escape to an island of imagination + innovation as Maker Faire Bay Area returns for its 15th iteration!

Buy Tickets today! SAVE 15% and lock-in your preferred date(s).

FEEDBACK