Toto’s “Africa” Played on Tesla Coils | Hacker News Reader

Toto’s “Africa” Played on Tesla Coils

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197 pointsdatashrimp78 comments

Not sure if I can create some excitement for this here, but it doesn't seem completely off-topic. Immediately had to think of Animusic: "Unlike many other music visualizations, the music drives the animation. While other productions may animate figures or characters to the music, the animated models in Animusic are created first, and are then programmed to follow what the music instructs them to do."[0]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGCTLJDoMGw

This isn't my favorite, but the 'futuristic theme' makes it maybe more obvious why I immediately thought of it. I think I've seen all their stuff, and Tesla Coils creating music would have been right up their alley.

These two are some of the best for sure

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlyCLbt3Thk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41a3DR0sZ-c

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animusic

And here's a real-world build of the Animusic Pipe Dream project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCIkbr9HCcw

If you like these you might also enjoy the Wintergatan Marble Machine.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvUU8joBb1Q

Your description immediately made me think of oscilloscope music, in which an image is made with 2 audio channels being shown on an oscilloscope: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XziuEdpVUe0

Those last two videos are absolutely delightful. Thanks for sharing.

I saw a live performance using a 12 foot Tesla coil at Burning Man 2017 It was earthed to a 18 foot tall geodesic dome. They played a medley of tracks and then the base of the Tesla coil mildly exploded and started burning. I went by the next morning and the whole camp had packed up and left. Pretty awesome experience. If anyone knows any more about that project I'd love to hear it.

> I went by the next morning and the whole camp had packed up and left.

That's happened to me at Burning Man too. Entire buildings gone when I wanted to go and ask about what happened last night, like the camp never existed.

I like the anonymity and definitely be aware that no closure or responsibility is possible too!

https://www.coupdefoud.re/2017

I was camped right next to it, and I work with one of the people who built it.

Don't forget that Africa is playing in the African desert right now...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCuP7ABO_Go

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/toto-africa-lo...

There's no way that thing is still working, even if the story is true. (The location is "undisclosed" so it would be easy to just claim you did it but take it home with you.)

If it really is still out there, it's not much better than litter.

Here's an acquaintance of mine playing with a musical Tesla coil and a propane blowtorch:

https://youtu.be/M91AYp3_x5k?t=122

He also has some small tabletop-sized coils that are really neat:

https://youtu.be/li3rGKFfQ1A?t=18

And here's the Ghostbusters theme at one of their performances while spectators are standing inside the cage:

https://youtu.be/bTkjgBRiCsE?t=2198

Towards the end of that first video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M91AYp3_x5k&feature=youtu.be... he definitely gets struck by the arc, which makes me question what the point of the metal suit is. Is it just for show, to make it look more dangerous?

My understanding is that the frequency is such that it doesn't interact with anything in the human body neither the heart nor the nervous system but I would expect that an arc to the eye would cause some amount of UV damage.

If you're referring to where it appears to hit his head, he actually has on a "helmet" of sorts that's made out of rows of thin wire, so the arc is actually hitting that. The suit is not just for show - my understanding is it would be very dangerous to stand that close to those coils otherwise.

I don't know all the ins and outs of the safety of interacting with these things, but I do think one concern if you were to get hit by one of the arcs is skin burns.

Eye of the Tiger on a dot matrix printer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8I6qt_Z0Cg

Reminds me of [The User]'s Symphony for Dot Matrix Printers: https://vimeo.com/6868193

I'm just going to say that the (1998) combined with calling the technology "obsolete" makes me a bit sad, since I was still using a dot-matrix printer then as I couldn't afford a new inkjet. I had to wait until morning to print out my papers if I procrastinated too late the night before!

This is awesome - getting those chords to work must have been a pain with the harmonics and also keeping the groove. Thanks for sharing

We had a dot matrix printer growing up. I remember the first time I saw an ink jet printer it was basically magic.

Could you send this in a fax? (Never used a fax)

Dr Who theme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdrqdW4Miao

Super Mario Brothers theme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1O2jcfOylU

I don't recall if Mario was the first, but it certainly was my intro to Tesla music.

I still go back and watch it about once a year. The only maker in my high school was way into Tesla coils, and I have been Team Tesla (Tesla vs Edison) from the first short form biography of Tesla that I read.

One of Tesla's craziest inventions, to my mind, was discovering that, given the right conditions, a human can survive both high voltage and high current. He developed circuits to increase the frequency of the electricity (I believe a version of that strategy is applied here?), and if the frequency is ridiculously high then the skin effect puts the electricity into your epidermis only. Wikipedia says that 1GHz in copper is 2μm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_effect. I sincerely hope nobody has measured this in human tissue.

Reportedly, it makes you tingly.

This invention is bittersweet to me, because I feel this also marks the beginning of Tesla's transition into canonical Mad Scientist. He figured it was therapeutic and exposed himself to these fields routinely.

Metallica's Ride The Lightning(abridged), with actual lightning.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yD5oIegFKXg

It seems reasonable to me to request that the entire anthology of AC/DC be given the same treatment.

Or at the very least half of it, the AC.

A Solid State Tesla Coil is basically a power inverter so technically its DC/AC.

I guess then one should start with the most recent albums and work their way back to High Voltage.

Check out Arc Attack[1] (I've had the pleasure of seeing them live) for some other cool people doing neat things with tesla coils and music. They've done several different events, and even dress up in chain mail and dance around between the coils[2].

[1] https://arcattack.com/

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5xSYNFNEjI

Fun! Idea: Could the song be played at 2x or 4x speed, recorded at a high framerate, then slowed down to .5x or .25x so that song is in real-time but the sparking was in slow motion?

Would the sound frequencies really scale that way though? I feel like when you speed up or slow down audio it doesn't sound right.

This sounds like a midi, but either way, there are resampling algorithms that can change speed, but retain pitch. Or change pitch (this is what autotune does).

And plasma speakers: https://youtu.be/rasp88nbsRw

I'm partial to the floppotron rendition: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q260bjSiyq0

It's not quite as visually impressive as those tesla coils though.

His Megalovania cover is great too.

https://youtu.be/1MJ2g7Eb0QE

"Big Ideas: Don't get any" (Radiohead) played on old hardware.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmfHHLfbjNQ

My favorite is this rendition of House of the Rising sun on two Tesla coils: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JH-YmzZgZ-Q

Perhaps a bit off-topic, but the chorus of “Africa” is almost exactly 20 seconds long, so it is a great song to wash your hands to if you’re sick of “Happy Birthday“.

UIUC usually has a "tesla coil concert" at Engineering Open House, which is basically a big multiday science fair thrown by the students in the College of Engineering. Here's last year's: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bv1dY6C4WW8&t=1463

He also made a this gem by Daft Punk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mjrzu23Lc-4

And one more: Mortal Kombat theme:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TeeN9JKvay4

plasma audio can be dangerous b/c of the ionisation; here is a guy who went around demonstrating one, who ended up with ozone poisoning: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msE14cWTwKI

How long until Daft Punk incorporates some musical Tesla coils in a live show?

Update: somebody beat them to it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psoLXEBmfRg

Sound-wise, quite reminiscent of some C64 tracks, although with a bit more meat behind it.

Also you can hear AM radio transmission if you short the tower: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uo9nGzIzSPw

Electricity is both awesome and terrifying

It looks even better in person and sounds almost the same, just without the beat/percussion backing track.

Dammit, I really wish when people would do this stuff they would not add backing tracks.

They should generate the percussion beat with a honking big spark gap.

For the kick drum, shine an ionizing laser beam at a nearby storm cloud for truly thunderous bass.

Could you imagine? That would literally look like some kind of high tech war with the gods.

I don't mind it. I think it tightens it up nicely.

There's a video for Chopin Nocturnes Op 9 with no backing track on the person's channel!

This is awesome? Can anyone explain why all the notes are strung together with glissando? (like a slide on a guitar). I assume it somehow cannot react fast enough to produce the notes separately without sliding between them

Assuming this is the DRSSTC design I am familiar with it uses solid state switching with audio modulated interruption. The drive waveform is pulsed, the resonant frequency would typically be not significantly above the audible frequency range, and there's typically a few cycles of attack with active drive then several cycles of decay without active drive. There will consequently be a decent amount of smearing of fast notes and harmonic distortion but the interruption frequency shouldn't be sliding or anything.

In this vein, Device Orchestra's performance of Finlandia is masterful.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOgd2B__X0k

One of my favorites is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ. It HAD to be done.

There are kits for building plasma speakers, but the 1" arc is a lot less impressive. It's still a little mind-blowing that an electrical arc can make sound.

Another one previously on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21488786

What type of oscillator in basic synthesis would this sound be fundamentally broken down to? What's the physics behind it?

This completely out-geeks the PDP-8 I saw using timing loops to project songs to a nearby radio in the 1970's.

Since we're talking about Toto's Africa:

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MH9FyLsfDzw

Leo has a ton of fun tracks. Well worth a listen if you like slightly silly but technically solid metal.

I recommend his cover of Adele's "Hello" to everyone. He redeemed that song. It's clear after you listen his rendition that it was meant for metal.

Ed: https://youtu.be/LtQUJMBH8uE

It sounds like he's playing more than two notes simultaneously in many places. How is he accomplishing this?

Cycling quickly between the frequencies. The modulation on the Tesla coils is fast enough for them to give the illusion of multiple notes.

I thought the internet was obsessed with one song and one song only: Darude’s Sandstorm.

I’ll show myself out...

I wonder what it would sound like playing in an empty mall.

musical tesla coils are such a wonderful invention

I would have gone with something by AC/DC.

lucky neighbors. (actually serious)

It would definitely be cool, unless you want to listen to the radio, watch TV, use WiFi, Bluetooth or have a pacemaker.

'The internet is obsessed with two songs and two songs only. But for different reasons. The first is Smash Mouth’s “All Star.”'... 'The world wide web’s other musical obsession though legitimately rules—Toto’s “Africa.”'

Surely this is in with a shout? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ

I think "Never gonna give you up" is different. It's the basis of a prank, it is silly, but it does not inspire the same level of dedication to re-creating or really any kind of creativity around musical effort as two other songs:

- Sandstorm / Darude [1]

- Africa / Toto

"All star" is closer to "Never gonna give you up" due to it being a sort of tongue-in-cheek ironic kinda thing due to how bad it really is. "All star" also has close proximity to the Shrek based meme subcultures / trends, and gains popularity from that as well. (see: Shrek is love, shrek is life and similar greentexts)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXfnrEguhxA&t=8s

Reminds me the Four Horsemen of classical music in movies:

- Chopin: Nocturnes Op 9

- Mozart: Requiem - Lacrimosa

- Beethoven: Sonata No 14 (aka Moonlight Sonata), 1st Movement

- Liszt: Hungarian Rhapsody

> Beethoven: Sonata No 14 (aka Moonlight Sonata), 1st Movement

Speaking of, anyone who's never heard the whole thing owes it to themselves to give it a listen. The 3rd movement is off the chain.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Tr0otuiQuU

I should have known better than to click that link. First time being Rickrolled in years.

this comment is rickblocking our friend

:) I got one!

More relevant version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILYwXmUpuWE&t=0m7s

Well people have different taste but this metal version blowed my mind: https://youtu.be/MH9FyLsfDzw (make sure to watch the outro)

Hey now...

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