Windows music, whoda'thunk-it
May 3, 2011 6:49 PM   Subscribe

 
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.

Por ejpemplo:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEeG1qq0Sxo&feature=related
posted by chebucto at 7:00 PM on May 3, 2011 [3 favorites]


Add some reverb, and this is Enya.
posted by Corduroy at 7:00 PM on May 3, 2011


(whom I love, just to be clear.)
posted by Corduroy at 7:01 PM on May 3, 2011


I see Pogo has outdone himself once more.
posted by Nomyte at 7:01 PM on May 3, 2011


on the tin
posted by stbalbach at 7:04 PM on May 3, 2011


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


For suitable values of awesome.
posted by Scientist at 7:19 PM on May 3, 2011 [1 favorite]


i prefer the open source sounds of linux, myself.
posted by quonsar II: smock fishpants and the temple of foon at 7:28 PM on May 3, 2011






Shades of onestop
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 8:53 PM on May 3, 2011


I see your song using only sounds from windows XP and 98 and raise you a song using nothing but the Windows 98 startup sound.
(via)

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]


So that's Danny Elfman's secret.
posted by benito.strauss at 6:08 AM on May 4, 2011


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


What? Why didn't my link work? I said Windowdipper.
posted by Galaxor Nebulon at 7:34 AM on May 4, 2011 [1 favorite]


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 tracker module (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.

For instance, check out this .MOD cover of Paranoid Android. The field of music that's been composed this way is quite rich
posted by schmod at 9:25 AM on May 4, 2011 [2 favorites]


Reminds me of the Mario Paint music maker.
posted by Evilspork at 9:41 AM on May 4, 2011


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