Symphony For Dot Matrix Printers

nico_DNS writes: ""The Symphony for dot matrix printers is a work which transforms obsolete office technology into an instrument for musical performance. The Symphony focuses the listener's attention on a nearly forgotten technology: the dot-matrix printer. Specifically, it employs the noises the printers make as the sole sound source for a musical composition. Leaving the constituent elements untouched, the process imposes a new order upon them, reorganizing the sounds along a musical structure. ""

hp scanjet 5p

reminds me of the HP Scanjet Easter Egg-

set scanner to SCSI ID #0
boot system while holding down Scan button

you will hear "Ode to Joy" as Beethoven intended it-with the scan motor's whine :)

Symphony for Nine and Twenty-Four Pins

I can hardly wait. Now if they would only add a daisy-wheel percussion section, we'd be all set.

Dot matrix printers still have valid uses

Such as a permanent logging facility.

Send the outputs of /var/log/secure, /var/log/messages, or any of your other favourite logs to the line printer.

Hard logs. Good securrity. Hackers: Try erasing these puppies. Better bring a lighter!

Now, Dot Matrix printers to Music would be interesting. They could probably use a few old DEC line printers for good bass.

Later models (24 pin) would be good for higher-pitch sounds.

I suppose old 'typewriter like' printers don't count?

These are gorgeous

I downloaded these last week, I think somebody around here had pointed them out.

There is something extremely peaceful and soothing to these songs. I looped them back-to-back for an hour or so, and I swear it was among the most transcendant experiences I've had this year.

They also have a distinct 20th century edginess to them; whoever arranged these had quite the mastery of rhythm. ;-)

The horror...

Stuff like this almost makes me wish I could go back in time to the beginning of the century, so I could hunt down all the minimalist composers and kill them.

(by stabbing them over and over again... for several minutes... in the same location... with almost imperceptible variations to my rhythm... until those listening to the murder would fall into a trance-like state of understanding the structure of what I am doing.)

Re:I've been bored....

I remember using the tape drive switch on a BBC B microcomputer to make music and you could even make it make speech-like noises of you clicker it on and off at the right frequency.

It was a fairly heavy duty switch but one had to replace them every now and then doing that...

:)

The BBC would also sing to you as it operated, you could tell what it was doing by the electronic noises it made :)

Troc

.matrix

It's the new TLD for cyberscifi and classical music.

Coolasmovie.matrix , Wagner.matrix

And they thought jello could start fires....
--

Music to my ears

And I thought my printer only hummed because it didn't know the words...

Now if only they could synchronize your hard drives to the printer music, so you could get a higher range. Throw in the fans and the modem and you could do a quartet.

Re:hp scanjet 5p

Anyone got an mp3 of this, for those of us without the magical musical hardware?

Playing music on printers is older than most of us

From "Mechanical Music Digest(tm) Archives":
http://www.foxtai l.com/Archives/Digests/199812/1998.12.15.09.html [foxtail.com]

I heard that some joker put a print file in the hopper which contained the image of the print chain. When _all_ the hammers struck the chain at the same instant it dislodged from its drive wheels and flew through the plastic window of the machine. The repairman muttered, "I've seen this problem before. Wonder what causes it?" Even then there were "viruses" running around to wreck havoc upon the unsuspecting. -- Robbie

Except that was probably someone trying to do a cannon shot...

(Also from the same source): Introduction & Line Printer Music [foxtail.com].

Since I can't seem to find anything really good on line printer music, I'll share some anecdotes which were shared with me.

The "chain" on line printers (which holds the letters) used to have all the characters in ASCII (or EBCDIC, I presume) order. Notably, A-Za-z was present in unadulterated form. The problem with this is that anyone printing A-Za-z (interpolate for yourself, please) would fire 52 solenoids at once, frequently blowing the power supply (Or as mentioned in an article linked above) firing the chain out of the printer. The solution was to move the characters around the chain and have the printer translate by means of a lookup table (presumably). In any case, some people did go through the effort to figure out where the characters had been moved to on some printers, but this effectively killed line printer music. How do you do a good cannon shot without being able to fire them all at once?

In any case, it's much the same as using a dot matrix printer; You fire off combinations of characters to generate different sounds. The thing here is that making music with line printers dates from the early seventies if not sooner; Since I'm from the late seventies, it predates me. People were making music with line printers before dot matrix printers existed.

It's worthwhile to never forget your roots.

Re:The horror...

Stuff like this almost makes me wish I could go back in time to the beginning of the century, so I could hunt down all the minimalist composers and kill them.

What will you do for the 50 or so years between the turn of the century and the advent of minimalist composers?

Re:Playing music on printers is older than most of

Correct -- these things have been around for ages. I first saw chain printer music demos on an IBM 360 in 1966, and they were already old and famous at that time. In roughly that same time frame I saw an IBM 1401 program which played music through a radio sitting on the CPU cabinet. I saw the CDC device referenced in the article some years later, but I believe it worked via a third mechanism. I think a speaker was hard wired to a D/A converter fed from one of the CPU registers.

Re:The horror...

What will you do for the 50 or so years between the turn of the century and the advent of minimalist composers?

I guess I would use the end of my knife to pluck Middle C on a piano until 1935, when Terry Riley is born... then I'll start with him.

Why would I wait for them to grow up and start writing? That would defeat the purpose of going back in time. If I just wanted revenge, I could take it out on Brian Eno.

Re:Hard-drive races play this song, doodaa doodaa

Not everyone has a strict code review process for every little bit of code that goes into a product. I suspect the environment at Microsoft development is a lot less rigid than a lot of people would initially think. You gotta realize that if you turn everything into a huge formal production, you'll never get anything done. And Microsoft has really been spewing in recent years, so I can't imagine a whole lot of formal code review going on.

I myself added an easter egg to a program I've worked on (not at Microsoft). A Mandelbrot generator in an RTF print preview program doesn't take that much space. One other developer has found it for himself (in the code) in the 1.5 years the code has been out... and that's because of the blatantly obvious out-of-place "mandel.c"... sticking out right there in SourceSafe. I did it because, at the time, I had nothing better to do, and have always wanted to make an easter egg in a commercial product.

Silly me, I forgot the point of easter eggs (at least the Microsoft ones you see) and neglected to even include my name.

BTW, Ctrl-Alt-Shift-NumPad*

Symphony for 9 and 24 Pins? Look out ELO!

Symphony for Dot Matrix?

Man-oh-man, it must be Friday, 'cuz I read something totally different

Sympathy for Dot Matrix
(to the tune of "Sympathy for the Devil" By Mick Jagger/Keith Richards)

Please allow me to introduce myself
I'm a past that you must face
I've been around for a long, long year
Stole many a man's soul and faith

I was around when TRS-80s
Had their moment of dubious fame
Made Damn sure that Tandy
Washed their hands and sealed your fate.

CHORUS
Pleased to meet you
Hope you guess my name
But what's puzzling you
Is the nature of my game

I stuck around in adding machines
When the computer saw the time to change
I handled carbons and NCR's
As the lasers screamed in vain

Built like a tank
Held a general's rank
When line printers raged
And the toner stank

CHORUS

I watched with glee
While compatibility
and the price you paid
Were the laser's grave

You always knew
What screwed your CRT
It was EMI
From the DMP

Let me please introduce myself
I'm a past that you must face
And I'm the best for preprinted forms
That can't be filled in any other way

CHORUS

Just as every box is a terminal
Most of your print queue is text
I'm noisy as Hell
Just call me Lucifer
'Cause for some jobs I'm still the best

So if you meet me
Have some courtesy
Have some sympathy, and some taste
Use all your well-learned politesse
Or I'll lay your forms to waste.

CHORUS

Tell me baby, what's my name
Tell me honey, baby guess my name
Tell me baby, what's my name
Tell you one time, you're to blame

Ooo, who -- Ooo, who -- Ooo, who -- Ooo, who -- who
Ooo, who -- Ooo, who -- Ooo, who -- Ooo, who -- who
Oh, yeah

What's my name
Tell me, baby, what's my name
Tell me, sweetie, what's my name

Ooo, who -- Ooo, who -- Ooo, who -- Ooo, who -- who
Ooo, who -- Ooo, who -- Ooo, who -- Ooo, who -- who
Oh, yeah

HP ScanJet 4C

The HP ScanJet 4C actually came with a program called 'Jukebox' (i think?) that played ode to joy, when the saints come marching in, and a few other similar songs. I think it had a total of 5 tunes (quite a jukebox!) and it froze the rest of the computer while using it, but everyone always got a kick out of hearing the scanner buzz out 'It's a Small World' with its scan head motor.

Quite interesting. I tried to figure out the file format, but to no avail... I think if I could feed MIDI files to my scanner, I wouldn't need any MP3's! :)

jason

Reminds You Of Something? LOOK HERE!

You know, *every* time someone here on Slashdot talks about an old freeware or public-domain program for the PC and how they wish they still had it, I've found the program within about 5 minutes.

Hey, all you nostalgics! Go here:

OAK Software Repository [oakland.edu]

Right from the main page, go to the section called PC/Blue Disk Library [oakland.edu], and go to the PCBLUE subdirectory. Then download the big master index (pbcat.zip). Find the archive file that holds the software you're looking for (trust me, they're all in there), and enjoy!

In your particular case, you're thinking of the "PianoMan" software. There were actually many, many different tunes available with that program, not just the William Tell Overture (a.k.a. the Lone Ranger's theme song). The PianoMan program had the ability to generate COM files from the included music (MUS) files. That's why the Lone Ranger song got distributed so much more than the entire PianoMan package.

Rest assured, if you download Volume 216 from the above archive, and then spend about 2 minutes reading the PianoMan documentation, you'll be able to re-generate that Lone Ranger tune/program.