Musical Calculators, Too Cool for School…

While many of us might have thought it hilarious to see 80085 typed onto our trusty Casio calculator imagine how much trouble we could have gotten into if we had known you could play the Super Mario theme song on it too. Quirky YouTube channel ‘It’s a small world’ knows only too well what can be achieved with a calculator and a nimble pair of hands and they are leading a very curious trend of converting these digital number cruncher’s into ditty playing devices.

The humble Casio MG-880 may have been one of the first calculators to allow the mathematically obsessed to also express their musical talents but there is now a whole new generation of calculators favored by the current generation of musical mathematicians, most notably the Dragon Night AR-7778 and AR-8001, both available for around $20.



Used to produce numerically correct musical renditions these calculators also include many built in tunes and there are also many numeric instructions available if you want to dabble in calculator tunes yourself. In fact the calculators can recite back the numeric patterns required to play any number of tunes, although it is in Chinese.

Presented for your viewing pleasure are some of the catchiest calculator tunes played since the days when Casio ruled the classroom. Played by the calculator virtuoso ‘It’s a small world’, a mysterious and magical pair of hands capable of coaxing a tune out of tiny calculator, incredible.




Reference: Amazon Japan – Dragon Night
Reference: Its A small world (YouTube)

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Author: Athol Courtenay

Writer, programmer, photographer and ponderer of sorts. Keeping IT interesting with a dry cool wit, this is tech but not as you know it. Technology, Science, Space, Humor, Computers, Consumer Electronics and more.