I meant to link to this a while ago, but it fell between the cracks of my bookmark pile: some person out there, presumably a genius, has gone and reprogrammed an old dot matrix printer for use as a synthesizer.
It’s worth listening to the sample tracks with your headphones on. The music’s pretty loud (as anyone who’s ever used a dot matrix printer could probably have guessed), but it’s easy to miss some of the overtones formed by the print head sliding along the rail.
This reminds me of a story I heard on the radio long ago, about a person who worked as an ergonomics consultant in offices. He would go around listening to the ambient noise around people’s workspaces, and then gave them advice on how they should tune their computer and refrigerator to “play” major thirds rather than minor fifths. You can find music anywhere, it seems, if you look hard enough.
"Schoenberg said I would never be able to compose," the avant-garde composer John Cage once recalled, "because I had no ear for music; and it's true that I don't hear the relationships of tonality and harmony. He said: 'You always come to a wall and you won't be able to go through.' I said, well then, I'll beat my head against that wall; and I quite literally began hitting things, and developed a music of percussion that invloved noises."
that came out sounding like i wrote it which makes me an evil plagarist. i recalled the quote, googled, cut and pasted. guilt--.