Make: Online : Listen to the sounds of your data

Listen to the sounds of your data

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

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Comments

Oldest comments listed first.

Posted by: Spikenzie on April 4, 2008 at 10:10 AM

Where's the sound?

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

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Posted by: morcheeba on April 4, 2008 at 11:59 AM

Apple II

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).

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