Tymes: ...I found that if I gave a write command to
the tape unit and then aborted the write command before it got past the interrecord gap, I could
start and stop the tape as often as maybe 300 times a second, which is in the acoustic range.
So you could make a lot of noise with those things.
Hardy: He got them to play music.
Tymes: So I wrote the Stars and Stripes Forever. I used the console speaker for the piccolo.
It had a drum printer, which I used for the percussion. And I had a row of tape units all
synchronized so that they were all pulsing together for the trombones.
...
Tymes: We put the doors to the tape unit half way down so that they would radiate the sound
really good. And you could feel it in your chest. It would go bom, bom, ba bam bom. The
whole building would shake when that program ran.
He hacked up the firmware of a dotmatrix printer to send it commands from his Atari 2600 or 80286 Compaq to make music. "Sound is generated by the print head pins striking the paper and the sound is picked up by a tie-clip mic on the print head. By adjusting the frequency of the printing process in software, different pitches can be played (with about a two octave range.)"
Me too: https://doug.lon.dev/fourays
and I have 2 units for sale here: https://reverb.com/uk/item/83277820-doug-lon-dev-fourays-pol...