http://vimeo.com/33181232
…and after several rounds of zinc whiskers, take to the stage for a rousing if slightly off-key rendition of The Animals’ 1964 version of The House of The Rising Sun. From Vimeo user PURETUNE, who writes:
For this video i recorded each instrument separately with a decent stereo mic and i also used a mixer to adjust the audio levels. i would like to point out that absolutely no sampling or audio effects were used.
instruments
a. HP Scanjet 3P, Adaptec SCSI card and a computer powered by Ubuntu v9.10 OS as the Vocals. (hey, the scanner is old)
b. Atari 800XL with an EiCO Oscilloscope as the Organ
c. Texas instrument Ti-99/4A with a Tektronix Oscilloscope as the Guitar
d. Hard-drive powered by a PiC16F84A microcontroller as the bass drum and cymbal…
i would like to give a shoutout to James Houston who (i think) was the first person to use multiple legacy computer equipment in conjunction to make a song. Be sure to take the time to view his YouTube video “Big ideas: Don’t get any – Radiohead cover by James Houston”.
[Thanks, Dale!]
Update: It has been brought to my attention that a TI-99 is not a calculator (at least not in the common sense of the word) but an early home computer. Woops! Sorry, folks.
20 thoughts on “A Scanner, a Calculator, an Atari, and a Hard Drive Walk into a Karaoke Bar…”
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I love the hard drive
Thanks for the heads up on this Adam I enjoyed it.
Eh, A TI 99/4a is not a calculator. Other than that, a good headline.
Gee, that is sorta an important detail, isn’t it? Thanks, Ted. Sorry, all.
too young to remember this wonderful piece of equipment? the Extended Basic, the Assembler Module, the PE-Box, and who can forget Parsec (especially if you had the Speech Synthesizer)? I am old :(
Yes I love the hard drive
This is a very nice composition. However the [mis]use of computer equipment as musical instruments is not new. In the early ’60s I worked my way through the University of Kentucky as an IBM360 operator. My predecessors had saved the 1620 in a back room. There programs composed of DO-loops created EM fields corresponding to classical [especially Bach] tunes. To hear it: place your SONY transistor radio near the ALU and tune until the music was clear.
[…] There have been several examples of playing music with stepper motors in printers and with floppy drives. Here is a particularly good example of some old hardware playing House of the Rising Sun. Via Make. […]
Awesome
Thank God some people have too much free time on their hands or the world would be a boring place. :P