Polish engineer Paweł Zadrożniak’s Floppotron 3.0 is essentially a musical instrument that uses 512 floppy disk drives, 16 hard drives, and 4 flatbed scanners to play Andrea Bocelli and Sarah Brightman’s song ‘Time to Say Goodbye’. Sure, this may just be the instrumental, but it’s still an impressive feat nonetheless.
How does it work? Well, pretty much any device with an electric motor is capable of generating a sound. Scanners and floppy drives use stepper motors to move the head with sensors for scanning an image or performing read/write operations on a magnetic disk. The sound generated by a motor depends on its driving speed, which means that the higher the frequency, the greater the pitch. As for hard drives, they use a magnet and a coil to position the head. When voltage is applied for long enough, the head speeds up and hits the mechanical stop making a drum-like sound. Now imagine a musical solar road that can play songs like this when driving over them.
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