Musical Tesla Coil

2007viral videoclassic

Published September 24, 2026

Musical Tesla Coil, also called Singing Tesla Coil, is a high-voltage plasma speaker that plays songs by modulating its spark output. Austin duo ArcAttack pioneered the format in 2005, and their 2007 South by Southwest debut kicked off a wave of YouTube performance videos that turned the coil into a hobbyist meme.

youtube viralvideo game music memeslate 2000s memesmusic memesparticipatory video memes

Overview

A Musical Tesla Coil is a solid-state Tesla coil rigged as a plasma speaker, where the pitch and rhythm of the audio track are baked directly into the timing of the electrical arcs1. Instead of a diaphragm pushing air, the spark itself heats and expands the air around it fast enough to produce audible tones, so the visible lightning and the music are literally the same signal2. The result is a performance object that reads as both a science demo and a live cover band.

Coverage on YouTube leans heavily into two flavors: theatrical live shows by ArcAttack, often with a performer inside a Faraday cage suit, and hobbyist bedroom or lab clips of hackers firing solo coils through video game themes3. Common set lists include the Super Mario Bros. theme, the 2001: A Space Odyssey intro, and rock and pop covers, which fit the coil's buzzy square-wave timbre4. The meme is less a joke format than a recurring genre of shareable science-spectacle videos that keep resurfacing whenever a new build goes viral.

Origin & Background

Platform
SXSW (live demo) / YouTube (viral spread)
Creator
ArcAttack with Steve Ward
Date
2007

The first working musical Tesla coil was developed in late 2005 by Joe DiPrima and Oliver Greaves of the Austin electronic duo ArcAttack, with help from Illinois Tesla coiler Steve Ward, and the band formally launched in March 2006 to play local shows3. The label 'Singing Tesla Coil' was coined roughly two years later by David Nunez, the Austin coordinator for the electronic art group Dorkbot, while introducing ArcAttack at the 2007 South by Southwest Festival3.

The SXSW set is the origin clip most people cite: a video of the performance was uploaded to YouTube on May 31, 2007 and pulled close to two million views over the following five years1. Tech site CNET picked up the term shortly after in a March 2007 write-up on ArcAttack, which helped push 'Singing Tesla Coil' into wider circulation5.

How It Spread

After SXSW, Steve Ward took his own coil to DuckKon 2007, a science fiction convention in Chicago, and a clip of that demo was uploaded to YouTube on June 21, 2007, going on to gather more than 2.1 million views2. A follow-up video of Ward's coil playing the Super Mario Bros. theme at the Lightning on the Lawn Teslathon in Baraboo, Wisconsin was uploaded on October 11, 2007 and cleared 1.7 million views6. A version of the 2001: A Space Odyssey intro played on a coil at Penguicon 2008 was posted on April 22, 20087.

Other hobbyists jumped in quickly. Mark Smart staged a Tesla coil concert at the University of Illinois on March 7, 2008, with the recording uploaded to YouTube later that month8. New groups such as Eastern Volt Research, Tesla Orchestra and Tesla Music Band launched their own musical builds, and Tesla Orchestra's Open Spark Project ran a 40-minute participatory show in May 2011 built from viewer song requests3.

Mainstream visibility got a boost in 2010 when Disney's The Sorcerer's Apprentice, starring Nicolas Cage and produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, featured a subplot in which a physicist uses Tesla coils to play Stevie Wonder's 'Superstition' and OneRepublic's 'Secrets' to impress a love interest3.

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