alt Hacker NewsZX Spectrum: Experimenting with 1-Bit Sound
Comments
The article ends to a link to a video that shows off the technique and it blows my mind the Spectrum beeper could produce this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cOu32m3wvQ
A friend of mine built his entire career as a composer around 1-bit music (famously in the form of an album that is physically a circuit inside a jewel case) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBUVKNqdsEo
Reminds me of an experiment that we did with TI calculators in the late 90s. Someone found that you can put an AM radio next to the calculator and it would beep based on what instructions were run on the Z80. There were some demos that played songs via 1 bit beeps like this, but since games actually have to run instructions, you couldnt reliably play background music during gameplay.
People may enjoy this too https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6f8PURcPEE
End result of it playing 1-bit music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjTihhFG03o
Turns out 1-Bit encoding is the most efficient solution, even for the highest end of audio quality: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta-sigma_modulation
Some apparent links don't appear to work at the start of the page, and I couldn't see any links to listen to the output?
reminds me of: https://github.com/protodomemusic/mmml
It would be interesting if someone could implement or adapt Roman Black's BTC algorithm to model the Speccy beeper. https://www.romanblack.com/BTc_alg.htm
I hope everybody knows Tim Follin - or will now come to know his genius.
> Agent X ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T42WuUpBuHE ) or Agent X II ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNc_xczyGLc ) or Chronos ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-D24A_N4d4 ) or Raw Recruit ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kl8dAVybwq8 ) or Future Games ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orEXKOBIv_8 )... // A modern attempt, the ON and OFF album by Rich 'Tufty' Hollins ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nEfO4Yu7Mg )
(Repost originally for submission Furnace - the biggest multi-system chiptune tracker ever made https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41609254)