‘Printer Orchestra’ is a pretty special version of Bob Dylan’s iconic song ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’. For a start it’s played by machines and not your run of the mill electronic music technology. Nope. This cover is played by old photocopiers, modems, scanners, fax machines and hard drives. Pretty incredible.
Director Chris Cairns in association with Isthisgood soldered, reprogrammed, hacked and rewired 97 old printers destined for the landfill. They even custom-designed their own circuit board that could control all of the printers from one main computer. The result is a computer orchestra that’s alot of fun, ingenious and great to listen too. It’s not the first time it’s been done but it has to be one of the best examples of the form out there.
Here’s what Cairns has to say about the project:
We, and by we I mean isthis.gd, built a MIDI orchestra for Brother from old computer junk. Photocopiers, scanners, fax machines, printers,hard drives, modems and the like. We thought it’d be most fun to do it for real. We were really inspired by Tristram Cary, James Houston, BD594 and other radical tinkerers. Making cold stuff warm is fun. We found loads of old machines destined for landfill, took them to bits and reverse engineered them to make noises that we could control via MIDI.