Simon and Garfunkel's 'Sound of Silence' played on noisy floppy disk drives is surprisingly melodic

Simon and Garfunkel&#039;s &#039;Sound of Silence&#039; played on noisy floppy disk drives is surprisingly melodic

(Image credit: YouTube/Arganalth)

last updated 8 January 2015

If you want to know how this sausage was made, a YouTube user calling himself Arganalth specially tuned a variety of disk drives — mostly old floppy drives but also some hard disks — to play specific notes, then programmed his digital octet to perform Simon and Garfunkel's hit "The Sound of Silence," using a Raspberry Pi microcomputer unit as conductor. Apparently making music from floppy disk drives is a thing — here's a tutorial.

If you're not interested in how Arganalth performs his unexpectedly listenable magic, just watch below. And if you're not impressed, he has come a long way from when he was programming songs like Daft Punk's "Get Lucky" with his drives and a PC. In fact, Arganalth has quite a few songs up in his YouTube collection, and he promises more every few months. Thanks to Digg for highlighting the new video. --Peter Weber

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Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.