Phantom of the Floppera: A Musical Score Created with… Floppies.

8 bit music is so played out, it’s not even hip anymore. The new vintage-hotness is music created by the hardware that the ones and zeros themselves are stored on.

This bangin’ beige machine uses four floppy drives to create the score (in this case, Toccata & Fugue in C: minor), each controlled by a computer chip to manage the disk read speeds. The faster the floppy whirrs around, the higher the note. When a key is struck on the MIDI-attached keyboard, a signal is sent to the microcontroller to spin the corresponding disk at the optimal speed for that note.

Now, someone needs to recreate Beethoven’s Ninth using AOL CDs.

[Reddit]