Valentina Vuksic has taken one out of the Gizmodo book and has created a sound mixer that gets its beats from dying hard drives. If you recall, Gizmodo had a Hard Drive Dying Track Contest back in January.
Vuksics project, called Harddisko, involves special microphones being attached to the heads of decased, defective hard drives. The microphones are then connected to a mixer. When the drives are powered they conduct initialization tests that involve the heads moving in a specific pattern that creates the noises. Each noise is different depending on the hard drive manufacturer, model, firmware, etc. Vuksic rigged up a system of different, fully-controllable power circuits for interval timing. This project is on display at Aarau in Switzerland through April 2.
Raw hard disk sound [We-make-money]