Unlikely Musical Instruments: Floppy Disk Drives

Performances involving unusual musical instruments have been a longtime YouTube staple, but over the last several months, we've started to see more and more of a particularly strange "instrument" being used to create tunes: old floppy disk drives.

YouTube saw a big spike in searches for "floppy drive" starting this past October, when the Star Wars "Imperial March" below first went viral. It's now been seen over 4.3 million times. It was created by Polish science students at a university.



This week, you can witness how elaborate recycling floppy disk drives for this untended purpose can get. MrSolidSnake745 is an entire channel of retro-tech covers using the drives and his videos have been viewed over 2 million times and counting. Here's the clip that's currently trending...



And that's not even the only channel producing covers like these ongoingly:



While searches since October have been noticeably higher for "floppy drive" videos, the trend is not necessarily a new one and some popular floppy drive covers have been around for longer:



Check out the floppy disk topic page to discover more.