Take eight floppy disk drives, some MIDI software, an Arduino, and a little programming know-how, and you’ve got yourself a personal, polyphonic orchestra. At least, if you’re YouTube user MrSolidSnake745, you do. SolidSnake programs his eight little drives to perform music by systematically altering the speeds at which they run. “The concept behind this is basically getting the stepper motor to operate a certain frequency (getting the motor to step a certain amount of times in a second) which generates a pitch,” he told Wired. “Then we arrange those pitches together and we get a song.”
As should probably be expected of someone with a Metal Gear-referencing user name and a penchant for hacking obsolete computer hardware, the musical selections here vary from the nerdy to the extremely nerdy. Check out the Beverly Hills Cop theme above, and a few more of our favorites below.
