The Concentric Sampler [2022]

The Concentric Sampler is a modification of a 3.5″ floppy disk drive, which, in a crude sense, is a combination of a cassette deck and a floppy disk drive. It can record and playback audio from the magnetically coated disk that lives in the floppy disk. I’ve documented my progress and conceptual journey in some of my blog posts here. I presented the sampler in paper at NIME2022 which is titled: The Concentric Sampler: A musical instrument from a repurposed floppy disk drive; You can access the paper here.

The Concentric Sampler builds upon my work with the Floppy Disk Sampler, which has been documented previously in this blog. Above is a performance of ‘OPUS44’ a composition for live Floppy Disk Drive Sampler. It takes a fragment of Mendelssohn’s String Quartet No.3 (movement 2), which is recorded onto a floppy disk and explores/destroys/manipulates/glitches it out through the course of several minutes.