VOTD: Old Computers Play Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody

As a rule, music played by machines is perfectly synchronized and in tune, but this ensemble of old hardware sounds like a band in its early stages, just starting to play in unison. The band’s members are: an Atari 800XL was used for the lead piano/organ sound, a Texas Instruments TI-99 as lead guitar, an 8 Inch Floppy Disk on the bass, a 3.5 inch Harddrive as the gong and an HP ScanJet 3C on vocals.

There are software plugins which have the sole purpose of “humanizing” electronic music by introducing small imperfections in the note sequences. The musical incompetence of the machines in the video, added to the heroic melodies of Queen’s masterpiece make the performance depressingly human, and beautiful.

(Thanks to Robert Ashley)