Reminds me of Symphonies 1 & 2 for Dot Matrix Printer by The User. The User was/is the trade name of a Montreal based musician; the music (as the title implies) all comes from dot matrix printers, printing different character sequences.
Symphony 2 is the better one, in my opinion. Not good music for parties, but for headphones + walk around the country, it can be very meditative. A bit like Aphex Twin SAW2.
This makes me tap my feet, and my sysadmin gland spasms in time. posted by mhoye at 7:06 PM on May 3, 2011
The User is actually two people, and they have a website. The symphonies are called Symphony for Dot Matrix Printers 1 & 2). s/ejpemplo/ejemplo. posted by chebucto at 7:10 PM on May 3, 2011
boy are the "Related Posts" for this page ever dated posted by ropeladder at 9:28 PM on May 3, 2011 [3 favorites]
Finally found this one combing through my back catalogue of emails - Kirby's Adventures in Dreamland. Tad loud, and looping, but there you go, the animation alone is worth it. posted by LD Feral at 6:06 AM on May 4, 2011
Also there's Jim of Seattle's Welcome to Windows, which does kind of the opposite thing — takes the Windows start-up sound and turns it into a piano piece. posted by Rory Marinich at 6:06 AM on May 4, 2011 [2 favorites]
Jib Kidder has a song that, while it doesn't use only Windows sounds, it features them prominently. Windowdipper. posted by Galaxor Nebulon at 7:34 AM on May 4, 2011
This is awesome, so awesome I feel like I've been mimimized several times in a row. posted by Elmore at 8:21 AM on May 4, 2011
Transformer di Roboter cover Michael Jackson's "Stranger in Moscow" using the Mac startup sound as the bass line.
Weird. I was just going to link to that. What a strange song...
This "style" of music is known as a trackermodule (ie. a .MOD file) , which basically work by sequencing and transposing a number of simple, primitive waveform sounds to create a song.
It's very similar to a .MID file, except that the sounds are baked into the file, rather than provided externally by the soundcard or operating system. This gives the artist more control, and generally makes for better-sounding music. These files are generally larger than .MID files, but much smaller than a full .WAV or .MP3 recording of a song, which was a nice match for the storage/processing capacity of the computers of the early 1990s. These files first became popular on the Amiga.
Symphony 2 is the better one, in my opinion. Not good music for parties, but for headphones + walk around the country, it can be very meditative. A bit like Aphex Twin SAW2.
Por ejpemplo:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEeG1qq0Sxo&feature=related
posted by chebucto at 7:00 PM on May 3, 2011 [3 favorites]