Mr. Oscilloscope Risin'
October 7, 2015 7:36 PM Subscribe
Break On Through by The Doors, played by vintage electronic equipment arranged by James Cochrane. Here's a version with vocals.
Here's Mr. Cohrane's EOL Robot Band covering a few other songs:
Private Idaho by The B-52s (with awesomeness at 2:50)
Somebody That I Used to Know by Gotye
Previously on MetaFilter: House of the Rising Sun, by The Animals
Here's Mr. Cohrane's EOL Robot Band covering a few other songs:
Private Idaho by The B-52s (with awesomeness at 2:50)
Somebody That I Used to Know by Gotye
Previously on MetaFilter: House of the Rising Sun, by The Animals
This post was deleted for the following reason: Poster's Request -- frimble
Awesome.
posted by You Should See the Other Guy at 8:06 PM on October 7, 2015
posted by You Should See the Other Guy at 8:06 PM on October 7, 2015
The vocal version reminded me of MC Hawking. The vocoder "Yah!" is exactly the same. :)
Story: years ago I had an Amiga 500, and I downloaded shareware all the time. There was one small program called "El Condor Pasa" and it was described on the BBS as just playing El Condor Pasa. I downloaded and ran it and my computer started playing "El Condor Pasa," as advertised... but in a minute I realized it was doing so by spinning the floppy drive head! I freaked out and shut it down. It was probably harmless but hearing my precious computer play a tune by thrashing a motor was too much for me.
posted by edheil at 8:21 PM on October 7, 2015 [4 favorites]
Story: years ago I had an Amiga 500, and I downloaded shareware all the time. There was one small program called "El Condor Pasa" and it was described on the BBS as just playing El Condor Pasa. I downloaded and ran it and my computer started playing "El Condor Pasa," as advertised... but in a minute I realized it was doing so by spinning the floppy drive head! I freaked out and shut it down. It was probably harmless but hearing my precious computer play a tune by thrashing a motor was too much for me.
posted by edheil at 8:21 PM on October 7, 2015 [4 favorites]
Loved this. So many weirdly familiar sounds that I never realized I kinda missed.
posted by kinnakeet at 8:37 PM on October 7, 2015
posted by kinnakeet at 8:37 PM on October 7, 2015
The Yamaha CX5M FM Music Composer was a really interesting instrument for it's time, which was 30 years ago. It could generate 8 channel multi-voice sequencing arrangements, which made it sorta like a weird little Fairlight in a box, but way cheaper than any Fairlight. Yamaha did not market it very well.
posted by ovvl at 9:10 PM on October 7, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by ovvl at 9:10 PM on October 7, 2015 [1 favorite]
The DECTalk speech synthesizer is kind of an interesting piece of kit by itself. As an extra bonus, that Wikipedia article has a photo with the caption "DECtalk DTC01 (with a cat for scale)".
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 11:50 PM on October 7, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 11:50 PM on October 7, 2015 [1 favorite]
I might or might have attempted to make a piece very serious military hardware play Imperial March once.
posted by Harald74 at 12:36 AM on October 8, 2015
posted by Harald74 at 12:36 AM on October 8, 2015
I'd like to see a Frank Zappa composition played on this set-up.
And when I went to search for a link, I see that his wife passed just yesterday...
"Gail Zappa, nee Adelaide Gail Sloatman, age 70, departed this earth peacefully at her home on Wednesday, October 7, 2015, surrounded by her children."
posted by three blind mice at 2:06 AM on October 8, 2015 [1 favorite]
And when I went to search for a link, I see that his wife passed just yesterday...
"Gail Zappa, nee Adelaide Gail Sloatman, age 70, departed this earth peacefully at her home on Wednesday, October 7, 2015, surrounded by her children."
posted by three blind mice at 2:06 AM on October 8, 2015 [1 favorite]
I came to think of the Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson's 2006 IBM 1401, A User's Manual, which includes a lot of sounds from, you know, an IBM 1401. It's available on Spotify and well worth a listen even if you're not usually into electronic avant garde type music.
posted by Harald74 at 4:03 AM on October 8, 2015
posted by Harald74 at 4:03 AM on October 8, 2015
That flatbed scanner...perfect.
posted by Thorzdad at 5:22 AM on October 8, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by Thorzdad at 5:22 AM on October 8, 2015 [1 favorite]
→ The vocal version reminded me of MC Hawking
Hawking's voice come from a DECTalk, so no surprises there.
posted by scruss at 5:28 AM on October 8, 2015
Hawking's voice come from a DECTalk, so no surprises there.
posted by scruss at 5:28 AM on October 8, 2015
Poor Jim. Haunting an old stack of electronics is probably not what he expected on the other side.
posted by Poldo at 6:19 AM on October 8, 2015 [2 favorites]
posted by Poldo at 6:19 AM on October 8, 2015 [2 favorites]
My first computer music experience was with my Sinclair ZX81 - which had no hardware audio support, except for the one bit it waggled to make the tones for save to tape, and obviously no support in BASIC. But a computer magazine published a type-in listing for a morse code player, that had a small machine code routine to play a bleep through the port.
I rigged up a lead to the amplifier of a portable tape recorder. typed in the program, and then mucked about with the routine to see if I could change the pitch and bleep length. It was very hit and miss as I didn't know any machine code back then. And it was machine code, not assembler: to create Z80 subroutines on the ZX81, you had to start your program with a REM statement followed by enough ASCII characters to contain the routine, then have an input loop that took numbers you typed in and POKE'd them into the memory where the REM statement lived. You could then call it by the USR function: the start of BASIC program space was fixed in the ZX81 so you could use absolute addresses. Looked bizarre when you listed the program after entering the code, but it worked.
As did, eventually, my mucking about - I could set up different tones and lengths, but very crudely, and I couldn't string together different ones to any useful extent.
What to do? Well, the back of the ZX81 manual had the Z80 mnemonics and their associated decimal/hex value (I can still remember some - C9 RET) so I could pick apart the routine on paper... it took a lot of experimenting and headscratching, but I got there and began to see what was going on in general. I knew I'd won when I managed to get the program to play pitches culled from the BASIC pseudo-random function - and my bedroom was filled with the sort of noise you only ever heard in the movies or, sometimes, John Peel. Extra fun came from the fact that the tape port was tied to the video output port, so the screen of the 12" monochrome TV I was using flashed like crazy in time to the noise.
I was utterly hooked. I was also wide awake at 2AM on a school night and hadn't done my homework, so I was in trouble - and so the entire pattern of the rest of my life was established. You don't think in those terms at that age (16) but in retrospect something within me recognised that - I can remember so many tiny details of those evenings so clearly.
It got better. A female friend of mine was very impressed when I showed her the bleeping mayhem - this was a way to get girls! (No, it wasn't. And unfortunately, the female friend was one in whom I had no particular interest in that way, although she was lovely, came from a great family, and both our families at the time had assumed we were going to get married at some point, a fact I've only recently been appraised of. Somewhere in the multiverse...)
I subsequently discovered that I could hear the music just by putting an AM radio near to the computer, and then bought Toni Baker's Mastering Machine Code On Your ZX81 or ZX80, and really was off to the races.)
posted by Devonian at 6:25 AM on October 8, 2015 [4 favorites]
I rigged up a lead to the amplifier of a portable tape recorder. typed in the program, and then mucked about with the routine to see if I could change the pitch and bleep length. It was very hit and miss as I didn't know any machine code back then. And it was machine code, not assembler: to create Z80 subroutines on the ZX81, you had to start your program with a REM statement followed by enough ASCII characters to contain the routine, then have an input loop that took numbers you typed in and POKE'd them into the memory where the REM statement lived. You could then call it by the USR function: the start of BASIC program space was fixed in the ZX81 so you could use absolute addresses. Looked bizarre when you listed the program after entering the code, but it worked.
As did, eventually, my mucking about - I could set up different tones and lengths, but very crudely, and I couldn't string together different ones to any useful extent.
What to do? Well, the back of the ZX81 manual had the Z80 mnemonics and their associated decimal/hex value (I can still remember some - C9 RET) so I could pick apart the routine on paper... it took a lot of experimenting and headscratching, but I got there and began to see what was going on in general. I knew I'd won when I managed to get the program to play pitches culled from the BASIC pseudo-random function - and my bedroom was filled with the sort of noise you only ever heard in the movies or, sometimes, John Peel. Extra fun came from the fact that the tape port was tied to the video output port, so the screen of the 12" monochrome TV I was using flashed like crazy in time to the noise.
I was utterly hooked. I was also wide awake at 2AM on a school night and hadn't done my homework, so I was in trouble - and so the entire pattern of the rest of my life was established. You don't think in those terms at that age (16) but in retrospect something within me recognised that - I can remember so many tiny details of those evenings so clearly.
It got better. A female friend of mine was very impressed when I showed her the bleeping mayhem - this was a way to get girls! (No, it wasn't. And unfortunately, the female friend was one in whom I had no particular interest in that way, although she was lovely, came from a great family, and both our families at the time had assumed we were going to get married at some point, a fact I've only recently been appraised of. Somewhere in the multiverse...)
I subsequently discovered that I could hear the music just by putting an AM radio near to the computer, and then bought Toni Baker's Mastering Machine Code On Your ZX81 or ZX80, and really was off to the races.)
posted by Devonian at 6:25 AM on October 8, 2015 [4 favorites]
Metafilter: wide awake at 2AM on a school night and hadn't done our homework.
posted by scruss at 7:10 AM on October 8, 2015 [2 favorites]
posted by scruss at 7:10 AM on October 8, 2015 [2 favorites]
edheil Story: years ago I had an Amiga 500, and I downloaded shareware all the time. There was one small program called "El Condor Pasa" and it was described on the BBS as just playing El Condor Pasa.
this one
posted by thingonaspring at 10:39 AM on October 8, 2015
this one
posted by thingonaspring at 10:39 AM on October 8, 2015
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posted by HuronBob at 7:52 PM on October 7, 2015