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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.
(Score: 2) by KritonK on Monday February 11 2019, @10:40AM
Back in the days of Windows 3.1 (and, possibly, Windows 95), I remember installing a Windows driver that allowed sounds to be played through the PC speaker. I think it produced much better sounds than those in this album.
A quick search found this [winworldpc.com] driver, which may or may not have been it; I have no way of testing it.