Here’s something to please fans of computers and classic rock alike. One YouTube user has uploaded a video of computer parts doing a rendition of “The House of the Rising Sun.”
This version was done by a Canadian computer enthusiast going by the name of bd594. He’s already done a lot of videos of old computer parts doing interesting things, including covers of other classic songs.
This time he’s built an entire band to do this cover of the classic song made famous by The Animals. First, there’s a Texas Instruments Ti-99 providing the famous guitar riff in 8-bit form, which is seen on a Tektronix oscilloscope. The organ is done by an Atari 800XL, the waveform of which is shown on another oscilloscope. An old HP flatbed scanner provides the main melody, being controlled by a computer running Ubuntu Linux. Finally, a partially dismantled hard drive serves as the drums.
“For this video I recorded each instrument separately with a decent stereo mic and i also used a mixer to adjust the audio levels,” bd594 said on the video description. I would like to point out that absolutely no sampling or audio effects were used.” He also says he liked the way the hard drive drums turned out in the video, but claims the timing was off. I couldn’t really find anything wrong with the performance, and I really hope he does more cool stuff like this in the future. It’s nice to see old computer parts actually being used to make something cool instead of just gathering dust in a closet somewhere or, worse, ending up in a landfill.
Fun fact: “The House of the Rising Sun” is originally a traditional folk song, so this version is a cover version The Animals did back in the ’60s.
You will also want to check out a version of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” he did that we’ve covered previously. Geeks who love classic rock will also no doubt enjoy a rendition of The Who’s “Baba O’Riley” made out of Windows error messages. For “Star Wars” fans, there’s the “Imperial March” played on a floppy drive.
