Z80, forgive me

Ok, the new thing is 1-bit music made with Z80! Just like with the AppleII-post before, this is me being an astonished newbie. It sounds so nice and data, I can’t believe it’s not a sound chip!

Z80 is the processor found inside shit loads of 1980s machines, for example Gameboy, Sinclair ZX 80/81/Spectrum, MSX-computers, Commodore 128, TRS-80, Amstrad CPC, and more funny named ones including Galaksija, Tatung Einstein, Coleco Adam, Data Science XOR, Grundy NewBrain, MicroBee, and Tiki 100.

So yesterday I found this and this, filled with mp3s of Z80-music made with the ZX Spectrum (or clones). This is how it works, according to Yerzmey: “Z80 chip produces all sounds and sends them into BEEPER and AUDIO-OUT connector of ZX SPECTRUM (jack) through ULA chip”. Normally you can play 1 channel square waves, but with the 3.5 MHz of this Z80 you can play samples and get up to 8 channels of sounds! So this is another example of chip music that does not only play sounds immanent inside sound chips, but uses the CPU to create a sort of softsynth.

There is a bunch of different software to make Z80-music on the Spectrum, but curiously enough there is only one tracker in the list that Mister Beep shows. They all seem quite interesting. Apparently there is no editor for Tim Follin’s 3 channel sample playing routine. But this month TDM used it anyway, in a coop-track with Mister Beep, where he composed his bits in assembler: Insane organist. The most bizarre Spectrum software might be this one, which lets you compose true data music: you save the song data on to cassette, and when you play it in a normal cassette deck you can hear it again! I haven’t tried the software, so I am not sure how it works, but it sounds like this.

There are lots of people developing things for the ZX Spectrum still, like ZX Spectrum Orchestra. Demosceners hang out at raww.org and there’s daily action. A few days ago Yerzmey announced that people are playing Beeper music on Atari XL/XE! It does not use the Pokey, but rather the GTIA (which apparently generates a click sound when typing). Mister Beep also released a new ZX Spectrum demo this month: check it. And get these ones:

Alberto Gonzalez – The Light Corridor (slow and foxy)
Andy Mills – AnoGaia (funky and mini-squeeky)
Ben Daglish – Dark Fusion (rockfunk)
David Whittaker – Brave Starr (micro epic)
Fuxoft – Starfox (rockfunk)
Jason Brook – Rastan Saga (adventure tonality)
Tim Follin – Agent X part 2
Tim Follin – Future Games

Drum Machine (1984), 'photo' by Mister Beep

Talk at HAIP – Hack Act Interact Progress

A while ago I went to Ljubljana in Slovenia, for the HAIP Festival. It is a festival about open hard- and software, music and art. There were lectures, performances, exhibitions, and a special club night with chip music. The boys made the music (Binärpilot, me, and Nova deViator) and the girls made the visuals (Rosa Menkman, Raquel Meyers, Delta Nu, and Mina Fina). There were some interesting lectures and performances, for example Rosa’s glitch talk (which I missed), Piratebay and Piratbyrån’s S23X (which I missed), Monochrom’s sculpture mobs, and Frey and Christine Sugrue’s A Cable Plays (which I missed). Note to self: things are more interesting if you miss them.

Well, I had a talk about 8-bit demoscene and chip music in relation to open source, hacking, and remixing. (world record in buzz words?) Instead of using the almighty Powerpoint, I used a ‘machine code monitor’ which is a textual representation of the 64 kilobyte of the C64 – from 0 to 65535 (or in hex number: 0 to FFFF). So I was scrolling through the memory to show the main points of my presentation. I’ll just give you a rough idea of what I talked about: the illegal heritage (cracking), aesthetics of demos (craftmanship not art, competitive not conceptual, trial and error), geography & sociology (mainly middle-class boys in OECD-countries, except Japan), bounded culture (internal community not reaching out, not getting attention), and the importance of originality (distribution forms good for ‘remixing’, but norms of originality prevailed).

After this somewhat subjective explanation of the multifacetted demoscene culture, I focused more on music. The sample-based music format MOD was used extensively on the Amiga in the 1990s. It was open source by default – distributing your music (in a demo, game, or independently) meant sharing your ’source’ (inclduing sasmples). MOD composers would sample sounds from records, movies, etc, and claim ownership of them. Using someone else’s samples was more or less ‘lame’. Everything indicates that the term chipmusic/chiptune was first used in the Amiga demoscene around 1990 to describe bleepy MOD music (based on tiny samples). Fast forward to 2003, and enter ‘8-bit punk’: gameboys, reverse engineering, anti-commercialism. Demosceners are sceptic, seeing it as bad craftmanship, lack of novelty, and a sort of invasion to their bounded culture which had born and raised chip music. Then I explained what I mean with medium & form to finally return to copyright and remixing again. The demoscene grew out of cracking, and has similar a similar way of disrespecting ‘external’ copyright but staying true to ‘internal’ copyright-norms. When Timbaland sampled a whole song from the demoscene, the ‘nerd army’ of the demoscene probably contributed a lot to the media hype that followed. Reality is catching up with the demoscene, and reality needs to watch out.

photos:r00s

On the left is me and my Superpowerpoint™, and on the right is the glitch monument from outer hell, made by Autoboy and me. Here it is in Copenhagen last spring at re:new. It was also exhibited at Mikrogalleriet and now I took it to Slovenia! It is called HT Gold and is 1) a C64-game for two players that is a lot of fun, and has no bugs 2) a result of complex disassembly and analysis, to intentionally change specific details like steering, physics, graphics, and sound of the game Hat Trick, 3) machinima, glitch art, datatrash, detournemant, and a modulation from game to play since the scoring board has been glitched. Theory, images, and video found here. The video looks blurry compared to the original though. Does anybody have a possibility to record video in 50 progressive frames per second? That’s apparently what it takes to be able to record HT Gold. It’s too fast for emulators, recorders, codecs, and other silly inventions, hehe.

Chip Opera On Dark Roads

A few days ago I was driving a car through the first snowfall of south Sweden this year. People on the high way were driving 50 km/h through the dark and foggy night, with snow flakes twirling around like little bastard angels. In the speakers I had Bit by Bit, Cell by Cell – Music For Soprano & Atari 800XL by Yoav Gal & Yael Kanarek (2006) / (clips here). Not being very into opera voices (I am not even sure if it’s fair to call this music opera?), the music had a heaven-and-hell kind of vibe to me. It is both dreamy and uncomfortable. Yoav Gal is a professional composer and artist, and Yael Kanarek is also an artist. Both are based in New York.

The voices are quite clean sounding through out the album except for the reverbs, and also some pitch effects and a bit of data-style arpeggios aswell (or atleast it sounds like it). The Atari sounds are also clean:  pure squarewaves with lots of polyphony. The sequencing is sort of intricate, with some things outside of the strict quantisation grids. It seems unlikely that the songs are sequenced and played on an Atari 800XL. The sound chip of the computer (Pokey) has 4 channels of sounds and 4 bit volume, and there are more channels and more precise volume envelopes on this record. (other people are doing very interesting experiments with the Pokey though, which I will get back to in a future post).

If the sounds are sampled bits of the Pokey that were sequenced on a modern computer, it is interesting to think about whether this is chip music or not. We can try to use the medium & form categories that I use. It is not chip music as a medium, since nothing really points to it being made on the original hardware. So, is it chip music as form? I was thinking about this as I was driving the car, and it was a bit annoying. With form I have basically meant bleep-dance-pop-music, regardless of hardware (see chiptune-tag at last.fm). The problem is that it leaves out music that sounds bleepy, is made with new hardware, but is nothing close to dance music. Like this record. Are there lots of more music like this?

Anyway. Here is more chip opera:
Tristan Perich – The Curve of Forgotten Things (soprano and 1-bit electronics, 2007)

And, here are two unrelated works to visualize this opera talk:

Screenscape by 320x200 (2007)

Anchor by Chris Ashley (2008)

Bruno R.I.P

Grrrr, just noted that another one of my old inspirations has passed away. Bruno (Jussi Pietilä) was active in the Amiga demoscene in the early 1990s making bizarre music like no one else. It doesn’t sound like chip music as in square waves and arpeggios, but it’s all 4 channel music with 8-bit samples (Protracker). It is really impressive works, still. For example, there’s the 5 minute death metal song in 116kb (controller), or the “finnish tundra orchestra” song that really sounds like a crazy little orchestra, only it’s a 116kb MOD-file (uralvolga).

You can download all of the songs in the original MOD-format at AMP or modland, or in OGG-format here (169mb). You can read more about Bruno and also see photos of him at a Bitfellas page. To play MOD-files use deliplayer or winamp+oldsk00l for PC, and maybe Cocomodx for Mac?

b.s.t – some kind of circus funk smelling 1970s
block busters – fast electronic disco
dr snuggles – perfect conversion in 69 kilobytes
gymnopedies – very cute cover
handskor – another cute song with a smell of porn
hits-90 – absurd
it’s a booty time – porndisco
pipeline – chiptune
sonar – porndisco
stor och liten – porndisco
tunnehairio – vocal discofunk
uralvolgafine – circus music

photo: 4T in 1992/1993

Italo Disco Noise Digi Screen-music

That headline almost attracts anybody, right? :) A few weeks ago the Dutch C64-party X’2008 took place and saw some very technically impressive releases. The winning demo by Booze Design is the new favourite demo of the C64-demoscene, because it is a 15 minute masturbation in coder brilliance. (part1@youtube) Also, the music possibilities of the C64 has taken a big leap forward. Fanta released a song with 4 channels of 8-bit samples and 2 channels of ‘traditional’ synthetic channels. (mp3) Normally the C64 only plays 3 channels of synthetic sounds. The code magicians behind it is Soundemon and The Human Code Machine (nice name!), who also released a demo called Vicious Sid. This one also plays Amiga MOD-music, but there is a part where the music is made by the graphic chip, VIC! The screen shows lines that produce a sound of Soundemon singing with his choir. (mp3) The funny thing is that all these revolutionary music techniques are used to play italo disco-ish music. I personally like it a lot, but there is something quite funny about coding something ultracomplex to play italo disco. :) I will return to these new techniques in a future post.

For now, I would like to contrast these coder porn with some noise porn aswell. Yesterday there was a very refreshing C64-demo released by the Australian coder/musician/graphician A Life in Hell: Fuck The Scene. In many ways it breaks with the flows of the demoscene since it has chunky graphics and dirty glitches. It does include some pretty complex code that appealed to many people, but I like trash style! So noisy and great. While we’re at it, here are 3 other tips for demoscene stuff that is noisy rather than flowing. (any tips is much appreciated)

PWP – Robotic Liberation (Vic20 2006) youtube
Booze Design – Industrial Breakdown (C64 2003) exe
Satori – Trashtank (PC 2002?) exe/mpg

…and just to have something easily clickable in all this nerdery, I embed PWP’s Vic20-demo Robotic Warrior from 2003.

Three Very Eerie Norwee

Sometimes the demoscene feels like a bunch of engineers that do crafts rather than arts. Sometimes it doesn’t. The danish/french Amiga group Melon Dezign are usually credited for bringing graphic design into the demoscene. Their demos were called ‘design demos’. I just came up with a third category of demos: ‘emo demo’. It is a bit of a joke to use that word, just to make it boringly clear. But anything goes if it rhymes. So here are three emo demos made in Norway.

(EDIT: hm, these images are extremely boring!? the demos are better..)

Creators & The Dreams – Brief Bursts of Happiness (C64, 2004) Short and grey demo with nicely animated graphics, mini-glitches, and a very interesting soundtrack, uncomfy style. It is almost all done by Mermaid, who is one of very few that codes, pixels, and composes for C64, Vic20, Amiga, NES, MSX, and more. What makes it even more rare, is that Mermaid is female.

Panoramic Designs – Mentallic (C64, 1992) Longer and bluer demo from one of my favourite groups because their style is psychedelic but not hippie, dark but not goth, experimental but not farty. It’s emo demos! In this demo there are a lot of scroll texts which was obligatory in 1992. It might not be an instant pleasure for everyone, but do check out more of their stuff (Psykolog and Parapsykolog for example).

Kjell Nordbo – Larger than life (C64, 2005) Already mentioned here before, this is probably the creepiest demoscene production ever. ‘The ultimate freedom you get only when you die!’ It seems a bit tricky to get it to work in some emulators (attaching a cartridge sometimes does the trick). Torrent with MP3s here.