"Joe Kesselman" wrote ...
For what it's worth: This isn't a new discovery. There
was a time when some of us actually used the EMI from
computers as a debugging tool. With practice, we could
recognize the sound of different parts of our program and
get a rough idea of what it was doing.

At the time we were mostly using AM radios as our pickups...
so an AM loopstick antenna might work well for your experiment.

They used to do "stupid computer tricks" back in the
1960s and 1970s with specially-written code that would
play specific notes on an AM radio placed next to the
big racks full of discreete component logic circuits.
I used to do this with an IBM 1620 that I maintained.

And even more bizzare, the really high-speed printers
(like the IBM "train" printer) hit the hammers so fast
that they would also produce quite loud musical notes
and people wrote code to play songs on them. The
managers that ran the computer rooms were generally
not amused.

Richard Crowley wrote:
And even more bizzare, the really high-speed printers
(like the IBM "train" printer) hit the hammers so fast
that they would also produce quite loud musical notes
and people wrote code to play songs on them. The managers that ran the
computer rooms were generally
not amused.

Some of those printers were software-timed, which made this trick a bit
easier.

BTW, if you're interested in this sort of silliness, you really owe to
to yourself to dig into the early years of electronic music and musique
conrete. There some stuff that's unlistenable ("lab notes" from failed
experiments) but there's also some that's Good Stuff, and it'll teach
you a lot about how synthesis evolved to where it is now.

In article ,
Joe Kesselman wrote:

BTW, if you're interested in this sort of silliness, you really owe to
to yourself to dig into the early years of electronic music and musique
conrete. There some stuff that's unlistenable ("lab notes" from failed
experiments) but there's also some that's Good Stuff, and it'll teach
you a lot about how synthesis evolved to where it is now.

Yeah, I took a class once on the development of electronic music. I've
also found online recordings of printer-generated music and that sort of
thing. I've always enjoyed that sort of thing, and reading about it
often makes me wish I was born 20 years earlier so I could have been
around to appreciate the early days of computers

The closest I've ever come to this sort of wonderful nonsense myself is
with the relatively modern TI-83 graphing calculator; users have managed
to hack it to run arbitrary Z80 machine code, instead of the SLOW
basic-like language that's built-in, and several games have been written
for it with sound effects that can be heard by holding the calculator
near an AM radio.

-- Josh