More Boiling Amiga Electro Wikkedism

Thanks to Otro (again), here is a second quick post about Amiga electro (and maybe it needs to be pointed out, like Akira did: electro before it started to mean Justice, hehe).

It & My Computer is a French artist who released electro synth pop music made with Amiga and keyboards already in 2000. I managed to find his first 12″ called Eat My Computer. I am not sure to what extent it’s the internal sound of the Amiga, but the music reminds me a lot of Amiga MOD music around 1990 with similar dry sounds and minimal composition. This is in part because the ST-01 and ST-02 sample disks, that were so heavily used on the Amiga for the first years, included many preset sounds from the synthesizers of those days, such as the Yamaha DX-21 (similar to DX-7).

Like It & My Computer says himself,using 8-bit sound machines was not very trendy in 2000, even if the compositions could be blamed for having something trendy about them. But it doesn’t really matter. With the combination of Amiga 500, Yamaha DX-7 and a Casio keyboard – it’s party ganze nacht anyway!

“At the end of my student period, in 1997, I decided to make music more seriously and intensly. “Plexxy” became “It & My Computer” (one of the first projects at this period using cheap 8 bit sounds, amiga, etc… I didn’t know that way of creation would become a kind of musical fashion 3 or 4 years later…anyway I had no choice because I had no money, so I composed mu music with an amiga 500, a dx7, one little casio keyboard and my rhythm box Realistic. Later I got my first tr 808.” / funprox.com

Latest rumour is that Josh Wink used the Amiga. Who’s got the other rumours? Dig ‘em up, girls and boys!

Legowelt – Amiga Railroad Adventures

Here you can listen to previews of Legowelt’s new album, made with modular synths, 808, and an Amiga 1200 with OctaMED. For those unfamiliar with his works, it’s cold disco electro. Period. Hehe. It doesn’t sound like chip music at all (to me). I am not even sure if OctaMED is just used as a MIDI-sequencer (are you?), without using the internal sound of the Amiga, but it’s still good news with some Amiga-related stuff…

Back next week with some LCP+BLIP-details, now off to the islands.

Interview with SounDemon, the Sound Chip Hacker

In November last year I wrote a post about playing music with the graphic (VIC) chip of the C64, aswell as combining 4 channel Amiga MODs with 3 SID-channels. I e-mailed some questions to one of the programmers behind it and I was happy to get a reply from him the other day. : ) SounDemon is what I would call a sound chip hacker, since many of his works are based on exploring undocumented features of the SID-chip and exploit them. These things do not rely on CPU-power to create new sounds, that most music software does. In my opinion this is one of the most hardcore ways of making chip music that is somewhere inbetween hardware and software. For hardcore hardware chip music, I would recommend you to go to Brisbane, Australia right now for EPROM-music. But anyway:

CHIPFLIP > So first just a bit about what you are doing and what you have done in general. Education and stuff.

SOUNDEMON > I’m studying computer science at Abo Akademi in Turku/Finland. At the moment I seem to spend all my time running to choir practices and doing math exercises for school.

CHIPFLIP > How did you get into the SID chip?

SOUNDEMON > I think the first music routine I wrote was for the Dekadence 4kb demo Perkele. BriteLite asked if I could do a tune that was very small, in order to leave room for as many demo effects as possible. The obvious solution to this was to code a custom player. So, I got into writing music routines and by experimenting I somehow managed to invent a few new sound routines.

I must add that I have always liked the idea of programming music. This is the only way to gain full control over the sound. I was inspired by old C64 composers (Galway for example) who had to work this way, before fancy editors were available.

CHIPFLIP > Tell us a bit about your different projects. How did you come up with ‘the new waveform’ in Pico? How did you do it and what does it actually do? Will there be new experiments with the waveform editor?

SOUNDEMON > As with Perkele, we needed a very small tune for Pico (which is also a 4kb demo). I decided to include some metallic drum sounds by using the “testbit trick”. While trying different parameters for the sounds I got some weird pitched sounds. Only after releasing the demo I spent some time analyzing the behaviour of the SID chip to find out how and why the trick works.

The routine works by directing a steady stream of angry bits towards the noise generator of the SID. The result is a confused SID chip playing sounds it’s not supposed to play. For a more technical description see: http://www.dekadence64.org/sidwav.txt

It might be possible to create more sophisticated sounds with this method than has been done so far… (hint hint)

CHIPFLIP > I once heard something about a 2 tone filter (“new waveform”) for the Atari Pokey, but can’t seem to find the information back right now. But have you heard about this?

SOUNDEMON > I’m not sure what this is. I believe most 8 bit sound chips (including the SID) use a shift register based approach for generating noise. This explains why it might be possible to get the same kind of sounds on other machines as well.

CHIPFLIP > Could u tell us a bit about your sample shocks from x2008? How is it possible to play 4 channels of 8-bit samples? And ofcourse, how about the Vic audio?

SOUNDEMON > I must first clarify one thing. In our x2008 demo there’s two new
major routines: A “MOD” player capable of mixing four digi channels AND the 8 bit sample playback routine. These are NOT the same routine, but they can of course be combined as we did.

The MOD player was written by The Human Code Machine. MOD players have been written for C64 before. The one by THCM is special because it actually sounds good and allows the screen to be turned on. (How fun is it to have MODs playing if you can’t display anything on the screen?) It’s based on straightforward code that uses cleverly precalculated tables to do the hard work. Somehow THCM managed to fit these tables and a MOD into 64kb of memory. I still suspect he cheated by hiding a memory expansion
unit inside my C64! (I haven’t found it yet)

The 8 bit sample player was written by me. 8 (and even 12 bit) sample playback has been done on C64 before, but this is the first routine that sounds clear and doesn’t use all raster time.

The VIC audio is just a fun trick. It’s absolutely nothing special codewise. It’s a bit like the 9 sprites on the same raster line trick by xbow where the idea is the achievement, not the actual code. That is why I gave the credit for inventing this technique to AMJ. He came up with the idea and after that the code was done in about 10 minutes.

CHIPFLIP > Do you always use your own software when you make C64 music?

SOUNDEMON > I don’t even have my own software. When using my own routines I just use Turbo Assembler to edit the player source and music data. I seldom reuse a player because they are typically coded for a specific tune. This is of course very time consuming so I do it only when it’s necessary. Usually because of tight size or raster time constraints.

CHIPFLIP > Are there other soundchip hackers that you know of?

SOUNDEMON > What exactly is a sound chip hacker? I like the sound of it, though…

CHIPFLIP > What will be your next shock? :)

SOUNDEMON > I will continue coding on network routines for C64… Something
interesting might result.

CHIPFLIP > Could you give us a few examples of 8-bit code, music, and graphics that you think are special?

SOUNDEMON > I liked Royal Arte by Booze Design a lot. I always liked the flow in
Extremes and Follow The Sign 3 by Byterapers. The 6 sprites over FLI routine by Ninja must be the most insane piece of code ever written.

CHIPFLIP > Do you have anything else you would like to add?

SOUNDEMON > I find it funny how this 8 bit sample routine became such a success.
I have always considered samples on C64 quite boring! Writing a sample player didn’t seem so interesting… But once I got an idea on how to implement the routine I wanted to try it. I guess the result was a bit more exciting than I would have expected…

Finally I must add that the 8 bit samples in Vicious SID wouldn’t have been the same without Mixer. He did an excellent job utilizing the routine! He also spent LOTS of time experimenting with the routine.

The Sound of Playing:

In 2007 Alex Yabsley (dot.ay) made an ethnographic study of the chiptune community, which is available online: The Sound of Playing. This may be very old news, but since it is 39 pages I wanted to give it some attention and mention some of the parts I liked in particular. I hope you don’t mind that I bring out your old university work, Alex! : )

He made interviews or questionnaires for 7 participants from the UK, Sweden, and USA, and also did participatory studies of 8bitcollective and micromusic.net. Statistically speaking, seven people is not representative for a large subculture, but that is usually not the point with a qualitative study anyway. I think Alex rightly generalizes some of the results.

* Chip music composers usually talk about limitations when they motivate why they make chip music, and secondly about timbre. Newcomers seem instead to talk about this culture being “fresh and new”, what Alex describes as cultural reasoning rather than musical creative reason. No one really talks about videogames. Far from everyone has a background with making alternative electronic music.

* “Whilst the demoscene is responsible for much of the infrastructure on which modern Chiptunes are built, it seems that it has become quite a separate community. However, it is a noticeable phenomenon that, as newcomers become more informed of the history of Chiptunes, they develop an interest in the demoscene.” I would like to add that they were always quite separated, considering the low amount of chip musicians from the demoscene that are active outside of it. But I think Alex has an interesting point in that chip music has become a gateway-culture for the heavier stuff!

* “[..] Småm believes that just playing sequences back and pretending your doing something is something of a live standard for Game Boy musicians. This is partly the case.” Is it really? Do you know of any chip musicians that play more live than others? I was once forced to play my only ever Gameboy-only set (due to other broken hardware) in a forest in Gothenburg a few years ago (with Småm actually). I thought it went alright enough though, since I always enjoyed improvising with LSDj. Does it get boring after a while, or why do Gameboyers not do more things live?

* The part about the compositional effect of technology was very good and could have been even longer! Bitshifter’s answer about Nanoloop versus LSDj is spot on about how most chip music software uses traditional notation while Nanoloop doesnot, encouraging music that is more focused on texture and rhythm rather than melody. Pixelh8 said “If you were painting a picture you wouldn’t ask someone else to choose your colours would you?” referring to him making his own software. I think a better musical metaphor for colours is the timbre of the sounds, ie the audio waveforms inherent to a chip. Software is more like the brush and canvas, to me. Most brushes and canvases do a very similar work, but a few stand out from the rest either by offering variety or novelty.

* Chip music composers gain more from listening to chip music than an average consumer. By having used the same hard- and software, you know what is easy and difficult, and worthy of admiration. “This further builds and develops both the community and the quality of work produced, as the limitations allow for a simple shared understanding, which is how the demoscene has operated for years and how it continues to be a system conducive to high quality creative work.” A very good point, I thought. Although some would say it is elitist technofetishism, you could might aswell call it craftmanship. That makes me think why there are not more competitions at, say, 8bitcollective.

* Hope you got a good grade .AY!

Chip Music Toilet?

Just an informative interlude….

Over at internet2007 we can find, among other obscurities, links to “one hit wonders” – search queries that only give one hit (it’s harder than you think). Of course, once you read about them there, they have turned into two hit wonders, since Google sniffs your pants faster than you think.

The last post relates to chip music, and more precisely the lack of (academic) research on it. There is of course more research than Google Scholar shows, but living in times when the map is more correct than reality and when Google makes the map, this is the Truth!

So, the 4th most relevant scholarly material on chip music is about … toilets! With chip music! It is not really academic research (yet!) but a patent – something that Google apparently is indexing these days, as part of scholarly research. Check it out!

7. A toilet according to one of the claims 1 to 6,

characterized in

that the device (20) or only the printed wiring board (electronics) for emitting acoustical speech and/or music information is placed fixed or removable on the support (60) and only the speech chip/music chip or microchip on the printed wiring board/device is replaceable (for example by a plug-in contact) in order to reprogramm or to respeak the speech chip/music chip/microchip.