What is the 1-bit music?
13 06 10 - 17:25 The most common question about the 1-bit music is 'what it is?'. This is the first feature post here, which, hopefully, will explain all the basic information regarding this topic. If you'll try to search Google about the 1-bit music, you can get impression that there is only one artist who made some custom hardware in a CD case and some music for it in 2004-2005. It will be wrong impression, because history of the 1-bit music is much longer and involves many people, including a few who you probably know, if you are into video game music.1-bit refers to a simplest possible computer sound device: a speaker connected to one pin of output port. This kind of device usually called 'speaker', 'beeper', 'buzzer', etc. Unlike a music for a sound chips, such as famous Commodore 64's SID, all the job of producing any sounds from the 1-bit device is in CPU duty, and involves some very well designed and carefully timed assembly code, which usually takes up all the available CPU resources while playing the sound. The CPU or computer itself could be 8-bit, or any other, so you can also consider the 1-bit music as part of 8-bit music, but remember that the name refers to the sound device, not the CPU.
History of the 1-bit music begins with very early days of the computer music. For example, very early computer experiments were done in middle of 1960s using PDP-1 computer with four 1-bit channels (not 4-bit DAC). You can read more and hear some examples.
1-bit became somewhat of mainstream for a few years in 1980s. There were a lot of 8-bit home computers at the time. The best ones had sound chips and many other features, however the cheapest ones had nothing but 1-bit 'beeper', because dedicated sound chip, being a complex device, increases the cost. One of the most famous computers of this kind was British Sinclair ZX Spectrum (16/48K model). It was rather popular, and the most common use for it was, of course, home video games. To improve presentation of the games, the game developers had to invent some ways to add at least some sound and music. It was some simple sound effects, which interrupted the gameplay for a short time, and some music, usually at the title screen only. Some of this music was made by the same composers who also did a music for other computers. Ben Daglish, Jonathan Dunn, Tim Follin are among them. Some of the composers also made all the sound code, which is often was masterpiece.
The idea of generation complex sounds on 1-bit sound device is to change the single bit in a complex way. There are few common algorithms and many ways to implement them. This allows to get (with many limitations) few channels of the tone, different timbres, few levels of the volume, drums, etc. On Z80 at 3.5 MHz it is possible to produce 1-8 channels of the sound. More channels generally means lower quality of the sound. The most common configuration is two channels with simple drums, one of the most complex and hyped 1-bit music engines is Tim Follin's 5-channel engine for ZX Spectrum. The sound is highly depends from the code, however most of the 1-bit music has common characteristics: low-fi, detuned, clicky and noisy (especially the 5-channel engine), usually with very synthetic drums, and with rather unique sound overall. It could remind you vinyl disks and early arcade sound effects.
After heyday of the 1-bit music there was not too much attempts to make it. It became very retro underground. In 2000s there was start of very slow growing of the 1-bit music scene, with very few people, and Mister Beep as the most active enthusiast, and ZX Spectrum as the most common platform. The most limiting factor was lack of good music tools, authors had to either make their own code, or to use very old music software with user-unfriendly staff-type interfaces. Breakthrough happened in 2009, then a few new tools for ZX Spectrum were developed, most of them had a usual tracker-type interface. Major achievement was done just recently, in April 2010, when Beepola, the first 1-bit cross-tracker for Windows, was released, and lead to rapid grow of the 1-bit music scene.
two comments
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Sent on 06 08 10 - 20:05 , via justin bieber tickets
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