With artists like Amon Tobin and Schneider TM producing entire albums based on field recordings, you can expect the definition of what a musical instrument is to grow more relaxed. And there are some people (mostly hippies) who do away with definition and insist music is everywhere. I don’t agree with that line of thought, but it definitely can come from the least expected, everyday objects. If you have an old PC lying around, this may inspire you:
5) Game Boys
What you’re about to see is a grown, sweaty, bearded man making music in the chiptune genre, which is mostly based on production of very primitive sequences using the sound chip in the original Game Boy. There’s a documentary here you might want to check out.
4) Printers
Remember those old dot-matrix printers? The ones that could be used to print the equivalent of cave paintings in the “Information Age”? Now you can put yours to good use sort of. I think we can agree this is cooler than printing an ASCii Tweety Bird.
3) Hard Drives
This is possibly less “instrumental” but still a feat. You can control the RPM and angle of the read/write head so that this actually produces sound with a pitch range.
2) Scanners
Or “Reverse Printers” as I like to call them, are also capable of a very warm and dynamic tone. I would actually want to play this one. Bonus points to scanners on this list for coming with their own lightshow.
1) Floppy Disk Drives
This is #1 mainly because of the quality of sound. Floppy Disks definitely have a greater range and more familiar sound overall, but still retain that “I am obsolete because I hum” quality. This piece is particularly impressive:
BONUS:
Put it all together
Make music and save some money by using Lenovo promotional codes for your next tech purchase.
