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posted by martyb on Sunday February 10 2019, @06:48AM   Printer-friendly
from the what-can-he-do-with-a-Teletype? dept.

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

Feel the beep: This album is played entirely on a PC motherboard speaker

If you’re craving a truly different sound with which to slay the crew this weekend, look no further than System Beeps, a new album by shiru8bit — though you may have to drag your old 486 out of storage to play it. Yes, this album runs in MS-DOS and its music is produced entirely through the PC speaker — you know, the one that can only beep.

[...] Shiru, a programmer and musician who’s been doing “retro” sound since before it was retro, took it upon himself to make some music for this extremely limited audio platform. Originally he was just planning on making a couple of tunes for a game project, but in this interesting breakdown of how he made the music, he explains that it ended up ballooning as he got into the tech.

[...] How was he able to do this with such limited tools? [...] I direct you to his lengthy write-up, where he describes, for instance, how to create the impression of different kinds of drums when the hardware is incapable of the white noise usually used to create them (and if it could, it would be unable to layer it over a tone). It’s a fun read and the music is… well, it’s an acquired taste, but it’s original and weird.


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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by Thexalon on Sunday February 10 2019, @01:56PM (4 children)

    by Thexalon (636) on Sunday February 10 2019, @01:56PM (#799101)

    Back in the day, goofing around on an aging IBM PC, I figured out how to not only get single beeps out but create the illusion of chords by rapidly switching between the notes in the chord. So if you wanted C,E,G at the same time, you'd work out the frequencies for C, E, and G, and then do each one for, say, .02 seconds, and loop that 30 times.

    There are limits: If you play the frequency for too short of a time, then the sound doesn't come out, but if you play each pitch for too long, it starts sounding like 3 separate notes.

    It sounds like this guy took the concept and turned it up to 11. I'm all for it.

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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Pino P on Sunday February 10 2019, @03:40PM

    by Pino P (4721) on Sunday February 10 2019, @03:40PM (#799126) Journal

    In fact, there have been holy wars in some chiptune composing communities over whether to hold each pitch for 16.4 milliseconds (1 vblank) or 32.8 milliseconds (2 vblanks). See this topic on NESdev BBS [nesdev.com] for example.

  • (Score: 2) by istartedi on Sunday February 10 2019, @06:29PM (2 children)

    by istartedi (123) on Sunday February 10 2019, @06:29PM (#799159) Journal

    I have fond memories of downloading something like this at school in the early 90s. It was a program that played the entire William Tell Overture (Lone Ranger theme) through the PC speaker. I think somebody even had a primitive music format that you could load into the program, but for simplicity's sake they had bundled the code and the tune into a single EXE.

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    • (Score: 2) by RandomFactor on Sunday February 10 2019, @07:06PM (1 child)

      by RandomFactor (3682) Subscriber Badge on Sunday February 10 2019, @07:06PM (#799173) Journal

      Hah! I remember this also. I wonder if it is still out there somewhere...

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