Coil whine can be musical, demonstrates engineering student — this usually hated noise can make some people happy

An engineering student has demonstrated a piece of music being played via coil whine. In the PC world, this electronic noise pollution is usually an unwanted side effect from running high-performance components at full pelt. However, keen electronic DIYer Battery Potato has videoed an inductor coil playing a catchy chip tune.

Sorry I don’t recognize the tune being played. It sounds like it could be a classic Nintendo Game Boy game music track, but almost anything played through a coil may sound like that.

Many of you will have bought or built a high-performance PC that is afflicted with components that produce audible coil whine. In my long computer tinkering history, I only remember two coil whine emitting components: a Zotac RTX 4080, and a (recent) lesser-known Chinese brand NVMe SSD. Other components that might have noisy coils are PSUs and motherboards.

Coil whine is an audible phenomenon that occurs when inductors (and sometimes capacitors) vibrate in response to rapidly changing electrical loads. For PC enthusiasts this can be maddening if you have what is otherwise a pleasingly quiet machine. PCs most often exhibit coil whine when you are hitting very high frame rates (GPU) or transferring oodles of data files (SSD). It is usually a high-pitched audible effect, so coil whine can be particularly bothersome to those who can hear high-pitched sounds clearly and are sensitive to them.

Battery Potato, an electrical engineering student at Nagaoka University of Technology, has sought to make coil whine a feature instead of an electronics bug. You can see from the video that a simple toroidal inductor has been constructed, and the electronics DIYer is running current through it. Perhaps this simple homebrew inductor was chosen for this ‘music’ project as it produced clearer sound than off-the-shelf components. A modulated current waveform is likely being fed directly to the coils to make them ‘sing’ as intended.

The OCCT stress tester introduced musical coil whine last year

The above story of music being squeezed out of a coil whine noisescape isn’t unprecedented. Last October we reported on stress tester OCCT version 15 release, which included a coil whine detection tool that can output “three pre-defined tunes.”

The OCCT devs reasoned that pushing components with a coil whine pattern that has musical characteristics would help users more easily recognize the issue. It especially helps listeners pick out actual coil whine in noisier environments.