This Music Literally Hurts Your Ears But It Sounds SO GOOD
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- Опубліковано 5 вер 2024
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Tim Follin did it again. Or actually before. Whatever, it's insanity. Dude is a genius. You'll probably find some really smart people in the comments who can better explain some of these programming concepts, so read those. I'm just a musician geeking out over the result lol.
crinkly music pleases the mind
Charles you have to check the Plok! soundtrack out! It was made by Tim follin (specifically the beach and akrilic songs)
Check out the NES Silver Surfer soundtrack (specifically Level 1)
Yup. His intro for Chronos is epic. Guy basically coded his own 1-bit sampler. In the era of the Spectrum 48k. That's just crazy. We were living in the 1980s and he was living in 2980.
The way Tim produced chords here actually isn't the "switch notes rapidly" technique you talk about in the video. It's more like, the pulses are so thin that multiple periodic pulses can fit in-between each other without causing distortion.
I love how everyone's referring to Tim Follin in the past as if he died, but he's only like 53 and very much alive haha.
His brother Geoff passed away recently. He often collaborated with Tim
@@rogerbaskin1084 aw I know, I saw that, from what I hear both of his brothers also have/had a lot of talent just like Tim.
It's because he hasn't made music like this in a very long time. To my knowledge he doesn't do much related to video games any more and basically left the (traditional) industry. So yeah, Tim Follin chiptune is dead and gone despite him still being around. Last I recall he was a director for some film stuff.
@@trulyinfamous He (his company, Baggy Cat) released At Dead of Night- y'know, that horror game that plays like those old FMV games from times of yore, like 4 years ago. He's just doing what he wants to do nowadays. You can't fault the man for just vibing after an accomplished career as a composer for 20+ years.
Ghost of Tim Fallon
So bizarre again Charles to have a video made about my ancient music!! But thank you for being so complimentary, it's very much appreciated.
Just to go full-nerd on how the multi-channel thing worked, the Z80 processor in the ZX Spectrum, similar to most processors, has 'registers,' which are basically like a set of chip-level variables you can use to do things like count up and down and do basic math calculations etc. So the way I generated multiple channels was to assign three or four or five of these registers (depending on how many simultaneous notes I wanted) to different values, then I had a closed loop that just counted each register down to 0, at which point it would execute a 'click' sound - the pulse width of the click dictated the volume like Charles described. The loop ran just about fast enough that these clicks went at a frequency high enough to make sound. The sound loop would run for a certain number of cycles, then jump out in order to change the pitch of the notes, then continue with the loop again. All the notes were contained in number arrays, which I just typed in manually. The numbers related to the frequency of each note, in terms of how many times per loop the click would happen - the more frequent the higher the note. So it was all just a process of trial and error to find the different notes, which is why they're often out of tune! Also if the loop contained higher notes - i.e. a higher frequency of clicks - the overall speed would slow, so I had to correct for it by increasing the note values. The issue was keeping up the speed of the loop, so another thing I did was to use 'self-modifying' code - when the registers counted down to zero, I'd just set them back to a specific value (i.e. let a=40), because looking up a variable (i.e. let a=noteOneValue) would have slowed the loop down too much - then in the main loop I'd write over the bit of code in memory where it set the register to a number with the new values.
As regards the music, well all I can say is I grew up with a piano in the house and two older brothers with a love of prog!
Hi Tim. You absolute legend. My personal favourite of yours is the spiderman vs men music. That guitar intro is something special. Thank you for all your work. "The Enemy of Art Is the Absence of Limitations"
It's insane that this isn't pinned
Up vote to pin.
I had no who you were before this.
Pin pin pin
Hi Tim, would you consider putting some of the 'historic' stuff on your website, or on YT etc.? I think there's a lot of interest still in what you did way back then!
I immediately could tell it was you from the style.
What's even more impressive is that Tim composed all of this by typing raw bytes (numbers) into assembly code. He didn't even know what key he was composing in, he just tried different numbers until he got what he was looking for.
I tend to doubt that he was taking a monkey-at-typewriter approach. The boy knew what he was doing. Doesn't change the fact that he had to input each note manually.
Wow! That’s even more impressive! 🤩
@@notnotandrew considering he was 15 w/o formal music training in pre-internet days, it's probably not that far off. he would've basically had to reconstruct scales and chords from scratch. probably why several parts are "out of tune."
I used to do something like that, actually. When I was 16, I got Final Fantasy VI (known then as III) and became obsessed with the music. I couldn't play instruments, but we were learning QBasic in school, so I programmed Shadow's Theme. I didn't know music theory or notes, but you could input a frequency, so I just tried different numbers until I hit the right note. Never did figure out vibrato. It's a beautiful track. Many years later, I taught myself drums. I randomly found a weird MIDI metronome program online where you input numbers, each representing a different percussion instrument. IE, a basic 4/4 rock beat might be 4121, where 4 is kick, 1 is closed hat, 2 is snare. Really basic. You could control the tempo and that's it. I would type random numbers and play it back. Hours of great fun. Mostly it was audio chaos but occasionally I'd strike gold. Then I'd teach myself how to play it on drums.
A bit like tuning a guitar until it sounds right to you and then picking the fretted notes that you found. The interface is radically different and less intuitive, but I bet he started seeing music in assembly code soon.
I tooold you! 😊
Basically 1-bit means the speaker is either all the way in or all the way out. Basically a manually controlled square wave. But by alternating the length of each pulse you can make it sound like more than one note at the same time. Basically arpeggiation on the frequency timescale. You can also create noise by doing it randomly. And then the composition utilizes a lot of arpeggiation on the melody timescale.
But there is no volume control. Everything is max volume. So it's harsh as heck but Tim is a genius composer (self taught by ear btw at this point) and makes it super compelling
I think the absence of volume control and timbre of the sound kinda relates it to harpsichord
sick overdrive though
No, this is a common misunderstanding. The waveform is not equal to the cone position of a speaker. The speaker cone's position (if you were to track it graphically) is a derivative of the waveform. If the squarewave is in its positive pole the cone moves linearly outwards (no acceleration) and if the squarewave is in its negative pole the speaaker cone moves linearly inwards. A sinewave in contrast would mean that the cone moves back and forth with acceleration/deceleration. The waveform tells you the velocity and direction at any point in time for the cone, not its position in space
Hmm... yeah you're right. The waveform is the voltage of the output of the amplifier. And the strength of an electromagnet is related to the change (slope) of that. Which means the slope of the waveform determines the power of the electromagnet and thus the acceleration of the speaker cone. When the line is flat there's no magnetic field so the cone will return to neutral. Makes sense.
Tho everything gets weird with square waves because theoretically they have infinite slope so you get some band limiting in the generation from the sound chip and then some from the amplifier and then some more from the speaker itself. So if you can generate frequencies higher than this band-limit you can generate whatever slope you want. I guess Tim utilizes this. So in theory the worse your speaker setup is at generating high frequencies the better it is for this kind of music 🤔
Did you see the video where someone created a (band-limited) square wave by constructing it from sine waves (Thanks Fourier!) and then just randomized the phase of those sine waves to create a waveform that looks nothing like a square wave but still sounds exactly the same (because our ears work in frequency domain not time domain)
ua-cam.com/video/Ffka-hPzug0/v-deo.html
@@antivanti Yeah, I've actually seen that. Very impressive stuff.
Now, wether having a bad speaker setup being helpful for 1Bit music, i doubt since that wouldn't allow for the tight control necessary to cutoff these imperfect squarewaves "mid-slope". I think this really comes down to the processing power of the sound chip in specific. If it has a low samplerate, then yes, you will get very imperfect (strongly sloped) squarewaves allowing for what Follin has achieved here with this technique. But I'm not a computer engineer so don't quote me on that x)
Can't believe he's covering 1-Bit music now
Next episode is gonna be 0-Bit
@@MartianMoonSo just normal music?
@@dragonknife68 no music
@@madcorndog Or in other words, John Cage, 4'33" 😁...
@@CoPoint it's not the notes but the silence between them
Tim Follin is literally a musical genius, he some how not only made chords on a 1 bit system, but he somehow also made percussion with a snare drum, making a snare drum sound with a 1 bit system, pure genius.
Tim Follin is so talented that it sounds like this music was composed for more complex devices that are malfunctioning as they play it
Great way of putting it 😎
It does 😂 I wanna like it, but it sounds like such an ear bleeding mess 😂
Like floppy drives?
@@brianmickelson4642 floppy drives are a storage medium. They didn't affect the quality of music, you just couldn't store very much high quality music on one
@@DoofenSpyroDragon16 ultra lo-fi,
but not lo-talent.
YOU HAVE ALL MISSED A MASSIVELY IMPORTANT FACT .. the 4 MHz Z80A CPU that Tim was using to drive the beeper to distraction... was also running the game code... and drawing the screen... there was no additional hardware on the machine at all.. to keep costs down... Producing music at all whilst a game was running was a massive challenge.. to produce music like this whilst a complicated scrolling game was running was absolutely bloody astonishing... Kudos to Tim and the programmers of the time!
I believe Manic Miner (to which Jet Set Willy was a sequel) was one of the first to do this. Also it had polyphonic music on the title screen.
All this in approximately 41K too.
Wait the Z80 was also the video for the ZX spectrum? There was no dedicated chip like the MOS-6560?
Yeah all without a timer too, so the pitch depends on how many cpu instructions you have available. Keeping it constant with instruction lengths that differ and what's moving on screen is an insane feat!
I wrote 8-bit assembly code as a kid in the 80s including interrupt-driven graphics / music which is one technique for “multitasking” when you don’t have a dedicated sound or graphics chip.
@@gaiuszeno1331The custom ULA chip did the video logic on the ZX Spectrum, but the Z80 had the job of updating the display memory file. The ULA would read the contents of the display memory and drive the video circuitry which in turn generated a digital video signal which was then modulated into an RF analogue video signal for output to the TV.
Making harmonies via pwm in the same way CRT TV's give the illusion of a persistent image, that's so goofy i love it
You should lookup how class d (digital, 1bit) amplifiers work! 😊
@@MostlyPennyCat You mean "class D" means those are basically high-end DSD-capable DAC's?
@@getsideways7257
Nope, Class D Power Amplifier.
It's literally just a high voltage supply being turned On and Off by a control signal.
I mean _technically_ Class Ds are DACs but those high end DACs produce line level output.
...
Or is it high current, not voltage, supply for amplifiers, I forget.
@@MostlyPennyCat Ah, I see... But then what makes them digital? I suppose they could work in PWM as well, which is in a sense "analog". One could probably convert the analog signal from a vinyl turntable into PWM for whatever reason without resorting to any ADC/DAC stages, thus making the whole thing analog from start to finish.
@@getsideways7257
They are digital because the high gain output signal is created via PWM, 1bit on and off at extremely high frequencies.
So, it uses the analogue low gain input to modulate the PWM control signal. 0V sets the PWM duty cycle to zero, Vmax sets it to 100%, everything else is a fraction of Vmax.
There are sound engines for the Spectrum that combine sample data according to music data, render the output PCM data in CPU and send it to a PWM algorithm driving the beeper, allowing it to play a PCM audio stream.
These are almost exactly the same thing.
The only difference is there is a smoothing capacitor at the end of a class d.
Tim Follin is a genius. Bionic Commando's soundtrack sounds worlds better than the arcade.. He's next level.
Bionic Commando legit had one of the best NES OST of all time
@@obscurity3027 I meant the C64 Bionic Commando music ua-cam.com/video/V1wsC-YdL-U/v-deo.html
@@obscurity3027 C64 soundtrack
@@33ordie or Atari ST soundtrack. I remembering spending hours listening to the title tune of this game !
Future Games was great too.
By turning on and off the "beeper" at a specific rate, technically you are amplitude modulating the beeper's tone. Any AM signal results in at least three frequencies; the main frequency; the main frequency + the modulator frequency; the main frequency - the modulator frequency. If the modulator frequency difference is within audible range, this produces a 3 note audible chord. Because of the way wave interference patterns (AM resonance) work, the most prevalent tones produced are similar to a "bugle scale". By modulating the three note chord yet again you can produce a 6 note, complex chord. The genius in these examples is working out the math according to the capabilities and speed of the microprocessor to produce the desired chords. All the math had to be an even division of 3.25 Mhz which is why some of the examples are off from standard tuning.
This was written in machine language. BASIC would never be fast enough. And it's my guess a lot of it was composed by ear, or trial and error.
This isn’t even wrong
this guy fucks - with programming
It sounds like a fun way to compose.
It's true that it's a modulation. But it's not AM, because PWM can only supply full power, and cutting between transient is almost impossible. The only thing that works with PWM is FM.
@@cefcephatus Turning off and on the beeper IS amplitude modulating. It's taking the tone from full volume (full amplitude) to full off (no amplitude) and that is AM. It's done in these older computers through software rather than a second input frequency or control voltage. Commodore (and some game consoles) had the only multi voice sound chip where one voice could be configured to modulate one of the other two voices.
🔹FM is possible in these old computers through a software method of rapidly (normally at audio frequencies) changing the frequency of the beeper. Again, done in software, not a second CV input.
🔹Pulse Width Modulation on the other hand *was not possible.* The beeper wasn't just a speaker, it was a piezoelectric sounder which has a crystal controlled, constant duty cycle square(ish) wave form with a 50% duty cycle. You could not alter the duty cycle of the square wave output unless you soldered in a capacitor/resistor tank circuit inside the "beeper" itself.
IBM and IBM clones produced sound the same way into the late 90s with a discrete piezoelectric "beeper". The only thing you could program control was whether it was off or on and what frequency it produced.
Another interesting OST from Tim Follin's work is Plok! for snes. Rumor has it when it was still in development Miyamoto got a chance to play it. When he heard Tim's music he didn't believe the snes could produce those sounds and thought they were coming from elsewhere.
It's not a rumour!
The Plok! soundtrack is another chip music marvel.
one of the greatest video game osts of all time
honestly one of my favorite SNES games
Oh yeah, Charles MUST check out Plok!
You didn't quite answer the question of why it's painful to hear, which also connects to how he achieved polyphony: when the beeper is cut off suddenly like that, it produces a click. Make the beeper click repeatedly at a regular frequency (that is within our ears' frequency range) and you now have a tone. Because it's just a bunch of clicks, it's very buzzy and unpleasant, but it opens up a wealth of possibilities.
That's the second part. Being a series of clicks, there's generally more space between the clicks than there is space taken up by the clicks, so more sets of clicks at different frequencies can be put in that space, thus producing polyphonic music. I recall reading that Tim noted that added those extra frequencies would throw off the tuning, so he had to work to keep it harmonized properly.
Though I didn't know about the volume part of that, so that really makes it make more sense. Fantastic stuff, and I'm glad to see you put a spotlight on Tim's material! Definitely check out his later work on the SNES and beyond. Soundtracks like the proggy Plok, atmospheric/ambient Equinox and Ecco the Dolphin, the cancelled Genesis Time Trax, and even up to his last few soundtracks before switching careers, Lemmings, Future Tactics, and Starsky & Hutch! (I think that his version of the Starsky & Hutch theme might be the definitive one) Gotta mention Gauntlet III, as well! All fantastic!
Also shout out to Tim's brother Geoff, who worked with him on a number of these soundtracks, as well as his own great soundtracks. He sadly passed away last month.
Rest in peace ):
No wonder the beginning of Ecco the dolphin scared me senseless. It was a very nice piece of music but christ almighty I wasn't ready
You should check out the album 1-Bit Symphony by Tristan Perich. It comes in a CD case that is just a microchip and you plug your headphones directly into the case. It's rad!
I love that album, it's such a trance inducing piece.
Chris Hüelsbeck, Rob Hubbard, Ben Daglish, Jeroen Tel, Antony Crowther just to name few.
Pioneers who had more influence than they never imagined.
As a 50 year-old bloke who got his Speccy back in 1983, I am delighted, delighted that you are covering the 1-bit music genius from the ZX Spectrum. Tim Follin, Dave Whittaker, Matthew Cannon, Johnathan Dunn - geniuses that could extract a daft amount from the beeper and the later AY chip. Robocop title screen is beautiful, CHase HQ title screen uses the beeper and AY to produce a stunning track. The Speccy unfairly gets overlooked due to the C64 SID chip, imo the AY sounds better as the SID has a particular tone to it. But hey ho, both amazing. (Speccy FTW)
Came here to recommend Jonathan Dunn's Robocop theme. It's an amazing piece of music by any standard.
Another way to think of this, is that any speaker is basically on/off - you're just driving it with a single electrical current that keeps changing. The reason you hear music is because all the waveforms of the different instruments get combined into a single varying signal, and your brain can hear all the components that are layered inside it. So this dude basically worked out how to layer all that stuff and define the final combined signal, instead of having a bunch of hardware and software mix it all for him. And also make it work while there's a game happening! That's the cool thing about chiptune stuff, it's not just about being a good composer, people had to work out all kinds of tricks to get around limitations and make the magic happen
The music sounds harsh only because it was never supposed to be played at such high fidelity. It was expected to be played through low-cost amplifier and a speaker, which can't produce anything above 10kHz. Also, since it is only "full on" and "off", it caused all sorts of subtle distortion in the amplifier, so it actually sounded quite warm and pleasant (in comparison to what we hear in your video).
where can people hear the appropriately distorted versions?
Interesting. Similar to how old movies are made for low Def. Lots of backgrounds are mat paintings, so it looks horrible in HD.
@@feralcatgirl Just go into your sound playback graphic equalizer and set all the sliders above 10K to 0.
Do you know how GODDAMN INSANE IT IS, to be able to get this level of music with literally only ONE bit??
This is black magic.
See also "black midi"
The music is quite literally spring shaped, not like a sine wave
nope
TIM FOLLIN IS NOT ONLY A MIND BLOWING COMPOSER BUT A GOD DANG WIZARD PROGRAMMER!!! THE THINGS THAT MAN PULLED OFF!!! HE’S A GOD!!!
And on many platforms!
Rob Hubbard and his work on the Commodore 64 is definitely something that needs to be covered now. Monty on the Run, Commando, the Sanxion Loader, etc.
I second that wholeheartedly. ^^
Commando's music is amazing
Comparing the music from the original Monty Mole (which is competent but uninteresting) ua-cam.com/video/Cf14WRGItnM/v-deo.html to Rob Hubbard's work on Monty On The Run a year later ua-cam.com/video/4EcgruWlXnQ/v-deo.html is an eye opener.
I'll add the music of Barbarian by Palace Software. On the Commodore 64, of course. And Lightforce, and Arkanoid. C64 versions exclusively.
THIS!
My favorite soundtrack from Tim & Geoff will always be from Plok. Best tracks "beach", "akrillic", "creepy crag" & "plok's house" IMO. Much less ear bleeding also...
The same way that moving pictures gives us the illusion of motion, playing single notes on a rapid fashion gives us the illusion of polyphony
I'm sooooo happy Chronos got a shoutout here. My first real exposure to 1-bit music was through Chronos and that intro chord is INSTANTLY nostalgic to me.
i made a comment on the last video hoping charles would check out the chronos music and i am SO happy that he listened to all of us who enjoy Follin’s music recommending that. hope he takes on the plok soundtrack (especially beach and akrillic) soon!
Chronos is a game with absolutely incredible music! ❤
Dude this video literally made me cry because of the amount of INCREDIBLE musicality behind these epic compositions PLUS the way you render them intelligible and electrifying PLUS the fact that the Sinclair Spectrum was my first computer I used to code my own video games with. I need to download this video and keep it in my hard drive in case the world collapses. Thank you Thank you. Please add the names of the songs or video games covered.
Never had I heard of 1-bit, and this is incredible, but these godly progressions truly remind me of kirby music, theres something I'm not musical enough to tell if it's just a cascade of modulations but you'd probably be mind blown by Jun Ishikawa
King Dedede's themes comes to mind (there's also a banger jazz cover by The Consouls)
Yeah, nightmare wizard/ drawcia soul/ zero, so many bangers from kirby
Follin's entire carreer as a videogame musician was a failure, he never scored a good enough game to give him any leg to stand on, and he bitterly quit and went back into obscurity...
But he came back recently, this time as a game producer. He made an FMV point-and-click murder mystery game. It's totally a passion project, that just ignores the whole current status quo. The guy is just doing what he likes.
*_Follin's entire carreer as a videogame musician was a failure_*
That's a bit harsh, in fact it's demonstrably false. Without Follin's contribution, those 1-bit games would've had no music at all. Being a pioneer of early VG music is hardly what I'd call a failure.
He made the games tolerable
It was not a failure. He may not have ever really composed a game that took off and sold hundreds of thousands, but he was a pioneer who influenced other composers that followed, and those composers also influenced other composers.
And even if he hadn't, the "tricks" he and others came up with would have been visible to programmers and engineers behind the scenes. That kind of exposure contributes to the expansion of knowledge and continuity across businesses, creeping its way into other creative endeavors.
I am a software engineer working on some pretty important, long term software. Some of my code gets rewritten over the years, or tweaked, added on to, or scrapped altogether. And there will come a time a few decades from now where the entire system is probably replaced. However, everything iterates upon past work. My contributions never truly "die," because everything that follows will in some way build upon the foundations of the past.
Wow I clicked on it seeing the title and was not expecting such a banger of a song
It wasn't part of my childhood, but another composer I love from the early home computer era is Jeroen Tel, probably best known for his work on games on the Commodore 64. Cybernoid 1 is my personal favorite, but also check out the music from Cybernoid 2, Robocop 3, Golden Axe and Supremacy (wait for it...) all on the C64.
Also, I feel the need to pause and raise a glass to the memory of Geoff Follin, Tim's elder brother, frequent collaborator, and chip music master in his own right, who we lost to cancer this past May 2024.
😢
"The Zee Ex Spectrum"... (prepares to riot)...
"We're gonna go with Zed Ex Spectrum for this video"... (Quietly puts down pitchfork)...
daria pfp
@@Not_Tailstails pfp
@@KBY30 :3
@@KBY30some dude profile picture
@@redgit9905 sky pfp
8:59 Worth pointing out that, although the beeper could be controlled using the built-in high-level language BASIC, the Spectrum was WAY too slow to do that sort of beeper modulation using it.
This sort of thing was only possible using machine code (written using a Z80 Assembler), which is what most games were written in too of course., just for the speed.
You had to make the most out of that massive 3.5Mhz of processing power!
C=64 is only 1Mhz(ish), but much better than the ZX Spectrum.
@XtreeM_FaiL The C64 had a dedicated sound chip though, which is why it sounded better, at least until the Spectrums got their own dedicated chip.
@@cynewulf1 SID rulez!
@@XtreeM_FaiL I always preferred the cleaner sound of the AY chips (in the Spectrum +2/+3 and Atari ST) over the Commodore chips. Personal preference I guess.
@@cynewulf1 Opinions are only things you can argue.
Tim Follin's soundtrack for Ghouls n Ghosts is a masterpiece. I still listen to it today....
on the Amiga - it is AWESOME!
Memories
@@ameldancalippo6912 "on the Amiga - it is AWESOME!"
Completely different soundtrack on the C64 though and did he get the best out of the C64.
The opening track of Ghouls n Ghosts for the C64 shows everything the SID could do (without relying on bugs in the chips itself) and is a masterclass not only in tunesmithery on the SID but in actual sound design!
15:00 I’ve heard in interviews he listened to a lot of prog rock like genesis Yes and gentle giant. I very much see the influence which is why I am also a big Tim follin enjoyer
Prog rock was also a big influence for video game composers in Japan, in particular Motoi Sakuraba.
Not painful to my ears. Only hearing straight fire!
I do enjoy the sensation of fire straight into my ear canals!
You didn’t describe pulse width modulation. PWM is about manipulating the ratio between the amount of time spent at 1 and 0 to create an approximation of a sine wave.
correct, pwm literally dictates the % of time the signal is on/off, you start with only a square wave.
you start with a square wave that's 50/50 on/off duty cycle, pwm moves the line when the signal flips (ie the duty cycle percentage of the signal)
shortening the duty cycle (on time), acts like a (farty) high-pass filter you can modulate with that duty cycle to shape the sound.
and when you start approximating more complex waveforms on a square wave by cutting it on and off rapidly on a micro level
(basically modulate it with another pwm square wave at a higher variable frequency)
you roughly end up with rudimentary wavetable synthesis, essentially a ring mod synth. which is the key to the magic going on here.
there are only 2 states in a binary, it's either on, or off, so his explanation makes no sense in a binary
what he described is more like an analog voltage controlled signal.
i was very much not ready.
I would argue those notes aren't "out of tune." More like the ZX spectrum, as a musical instrument, conforms to its own variant of just intonation as a direct response to its inherent tonal limitations.
The chord sounds different on a piano, because the piano is equal temperament.
Like an 8-Bit Freebird. Just keeps getting better.
*Mostly C64 composers:*
Matthew Cannon (Batman the Movie.)
Jonathan Dunn (Robocop)
Matt Gray (Rambo, The Last Ninja)
Jeroen Tel (Last Ninja 3, Cybernoid 2)
Martin Galway (Combat School, Arkanoid 2)
5:34 there's a Stoner Metal song by The Sword called Freya that sounds almost exactly like this during the breakdown. It's soo good.
Freya is a dope fuckin song. Good taste brother!
I love Stoner/Sludge/Doom Metal!
For those interested, the chords are actually made by using timers in the CPU.
Essentially, the timers are set to repeatedly go off at really fast speeds, fast enough that they each can generate a frequency. Then, those timers are used to decide when that short on-off signal is sent to the speaker.
Hopefully, that makes sense :D
Incorrect as the Z80 had no internal timers and no useful external interrupt timers in the manner of the C64.and it's CIA timers.
At best you only had the 50Hz frame interrupt, your own timing code and whatever time you were permitted after the main game loop did its (more important ) stuff.
Even the amstrad CPC had a 300Hz fast interrupt, the spectrum didn't have anybody that
@@RobCrawford23 The line scanning frequency on a European TV (PAL standard) was 15625Hz. You could potentially use an interrupt based on that. All the 80s computers had some kind of hardware to switch memory usage between the CPU and outputting to the screen (at line scanning frequency) but details varied.
@@londonalicante- No, the Spectrum only had the one accessible interrupt, at the top of each 50HZ TV frame. Just because the video generation hardware was synched to TV scanlines, doesn't mean those timing signals were detectable by the CPU or software. And even the 50 Hz interrupt wasn't precisely reliable - it could be delayed by several clock cycles since it couldn't interrupt the processor in the middle of an operation. Everything else was down to counting the clock cycles of each instruction in your code to work out how long each loop or subroutine took to execute, and then shortening it or padding it out with redundant instructions.
Wait wait, I thought this was going to be about the PC speaker (hint, hint!) but the first thing I hear is music from the Speccy's ULA (uncommitted logic array)??? Like, what!!! YES, I am ALL for this! The various AY chips, SID, and PAULA are sure to follow eventually! As for composers, Rob Hubbard, Martin Galway, Chris Hülsbeck, Jeroen Tel, Jester, Markus "Captain" Kaarlonen etc. so many :)
As for the Spectrum making music: Yes, you can use BASIC but I'm quite certain that Tim and other composers would use machine code written in Z80 assembler (the Z80 being the Spectrum's CPU). And also, because the hardware is addressed directly, the frequency of sounds can be virtually anything. As for chords, well, extremely quick arpeggios is also one way of achieveing that as you point out.
As for me, while we did also have a ZX Spectrum most of my childhood gaming was on the Commodore 64/128. Many of the composers I mentioned also wrote music on the Commodore 64 and Commodore 128's SID chip. If I were to mention one game, it would be The Last Ninja 2 and specifically the track called The Sewers Loader (yes, we had music playing while we waiting for games to load; y'all kids have NO idea what long loading times actually are!). Also, the games from Ocean Software had some amazing tracks playing during the loading screen, I would recommend the music playing when loading Rambo: First Blood Part II and RoboCop on the Commodore 64.
Thanks for looking at stuff from this side of the Pond too! My childhood memories are slowly unlocking. :)
It's touched on briefly in the video, but it seems like another method of doing chords/polyphony was literally interlacing two frequencies so the peaks of one wave sit in the troughs of another. You seem to have a good knowledge of this, can you speak to whether that's the case? That's genuinely astounding if so, necessity really is the mother of invention.
@@Tinybabyfishy I only know from reading about it and watching oscilloscope videos, so I sadly know next to nothing about actual coding. Just what was being used etc., but nothing on the how, sorry. What you are saying is undoubtedly true though. I know that good programmers were able to squeeze a 4th voice out of an otherwise 3 voice SID on the Commodore 64, and also OctaMED on the AMIGA gave PAULA four extra channels although I think that one was software based. So OK, to stop rambling and sum up: I know something about what was being done, but not necessarily how it was done. :(
@@weepingscorpion8739 IIRC (and I could be wrong), the software trick to getting that 4th channel was possible due to the flaw caused by the NMOS process used to fab the original SID chips, with the later HMOS variants "fixing the glitch" and breaking it, unless the user soldered a resistor to a pair of pins to reintroduce it. Something to do with a volume register, I think.
I'm like 99% sure the 4 extra channels with Paula was indeed a purely software-based solution, though.
@@andrewcoleman3741 Yeah, I don't remember the details about the 4th voice on the SID but yeah, it is likely to do with the original 6581 SID. Now sure how well it worked with the newer 8580 SID but the debate about which chip was better was and I think still is quite fierce.
As for PAULA, yeah, you're right. Put a powerful enough CPU (like a 68060 or even a PIstorm or a Vampire) and I think you may even be able to play the 28 voice MOD file from the Dope demo.
@@weepingscorpion8739 I used to be sooo jealous of Amiga owners, back when the PC speaker (maybe an original Adlib card) and EGA graphics were basically mainstream for DOS users.
Speaking of MOD/tracker music, it's a shame the GUS was a flop outside of the demoscene. I completely understand why it flopped, but hearing recordings of the few game soundtracks made specifically for that card sounded incredible compared to the wild variance you'd see between your typical SB-compatible + GM/GS daughterboard combos of the day.
One part we're missing in the samples is that the little speakers were rounding over the top end, so it wasn't "great" , but it wasn't as harsh as it is while listening to direct captures of the music into full-range monitors.
You beat me to it! Those tiny mid-rangy speakers don't reproduce as much of that nasty noise in the high end.
Tim is incredible. Check out his soundtrack for the game Plok if you want to be blown away by what he got out of the SNES sound chip.
The SNES audio is genius, you could sample your own sounds like Amiga trackers would do later on.
So instead of being dependent on waveform channels artists can make unique sounds, drums & percussion and use filters, envelopes and all that good stuff.
It was kicking the ass off every console in the audio department when it came out.
There are so many amazing soundtracks made on the SNES that still hold up today.
In case someone is curious, the "magic" has a name: Mathematics! Those machines run on Zilog's Z80 CPU, which execute instructions based on a quartz crystal oscillator (the "clock"). There's a table containing the counts of how many ticks of the oscillator (the "cicles") it takes to execute every instruction. With those numbers, it's possible to calculate how much time it would take to execute a series of instructions (called a "routine"). Knowing that time, the programmer can add or remove instructions to routines to modulate how long the beeper will stay on and off. It's a pain to tune, but once tuned, it's literally routine. The genius is on composing anything using them (even more considering those songs are really good), because any change of instructions completely changed the notes! This trick (and many others) was used in even more primitive machines, like Atari's VCS-2600, which should be unable to even show more than 2 colours on screen at the same time (or something like that) and beep (basically, all its best games ran using hardware glitches, which produced nice (d)effects...)
I never thought I'd see a ZX Spectrum collection here. Blown away today.
Your best video so far, IMO, because I grew up with the Spectrum and this gives me a new appreciation for the music that was created on it. I knew back then that the side-effects of rapidly switching frequencies allowed for richer and more complex sounds, because I had a speech synthesiser that used a similar method to produce marginally discernible speech, but I hadn't heard all that many music tracks; this video showed me some that I had missed, so thanks for that.
There's a great album by Tristan Perich called 1-Bit Symphony, which when you buy the physical copy it's a literal chip, battery, switch and volume knob. It's all fit inside of a jewelcase and has a headphonejack at the side.
The coolest part of it is that when you plug it in you're basically getting a live concert as the chip is actually playing the code that makes the music.
He also has other albums, but 1-Bit Symphony is the one I found out about first.
How it works is that you basically only have one bit that goes between 1 and 0 and the faster it goes back and forth the higher or lower the note is, which makes this whole thing so awesome. (edit: 9:40/12:55 well it's explained there anyway)
also the last track ends on an infinite loop, so technically the album never stops unless you terminate the program yourself.
Some years later (late 80s/early 90s) a very similar technique became fashionable for playing arbitrary wave forms through the PC speaker. At the time, I actually wired up my stero to my PC speaker output, and was able to filter out the annoynig wine. At that point it sounded a little muffled, but otherwise excellent. There have been some really fascinating solutions about in tech over the years.
As a 48k speccy user... I love the nerdiest of Retrowave that sometimes tries to capture this. The best bit was when we moved to the 128k, many games could finally for the first time have both music AND sound effects, without the collision of effects / cut out. Up to then a lot of games only composed for the intro screen and sometimes the menu's. Platoons 48k was a solid intro track, and has so many voices it's unexplainable - but the finest of them all is the Robocop title. Best known to many as the theme to Ariston adverts. Jonathan Dunn at Ocean dropped some amazing tracks.
I'd like to suggest a few artists or soundtracks:
- virt, also known as Jake Kaufmann. He did the soundtracks for many popular games like the Shantae and Shovel Knight series, but has also made a lot of kickass original compositions.
- The SNES era soundtracks of Ocean developped games, especially those Dean Evans worked on. Even though the games were decent to mediocre, the music is more than memorable (Waterworld's pause music, Jurassic Park, The Flintstones, etc). And the unusual thing about them is how long the songs were. Many reach past the 5min mark before it loops.
- Iridion 3D and Iridion II. The composer created his own sound engine and pushed the GBA to its musical limits for the games. Sadly the studio only got to make a 3rd game iirc, on the DS, before it shut down.
0:08 this literalyy doesn't make any sense at all, as 1 bit only gives you 2 possible states, so either 2 different tones/ on or off
The audio is encoded like a spring. The speed at which it's slamming into your ear, or rather, the depth of the noise, changes that noise. It doesn't show up on a normal waveform, but it looks more like an earthquake wave if you were to get a picture
On or off is all you need, 1 pushes the speaker out and 0 pulls it in. Now pick bits at thousands of times per second and the speaker makes noise.
Have you ever thought about checking out marching bands? DCI (or Drum Corps International) is something that always blows me away and the music and performances are AMAZING! Genuinely a great idea and I would love to see you check it out! I highly recommend the Bluecoats, Mandarins, Blue Devils, and Troopers. 😁
The TRS-80 had a similar problem with sounds.
Could only use the tape out, on or off.
Voyage of the Valkyrie had incredible celestial sound that actually sounded good!
I honestly never expected to ever watch a video break down 1-bit music in order to play on the piano. Wow. Absolutely fantastic!
TIM IS SO BACK ON THIS CHANNEL
WE GET MORE CHARLES HAPPINESS
Many musicians from this era, even the ones working on dedicated sound chips, created their own tools for composition and playback, but on the ZX Spectrum it was so extreme: they are actually creating their own digital instrument, with a very particular sound signature.
I grew up on the ZX Spectrum, the music you could get out of it was incredible, as well as game sound effects! Those beeps hits the nostalgia hard. Oh, and the random Spinal Tap "these go to 11" clip during your explanation of PWM made my chuckle.
adding to @acrosArchive's comment below - the lack of any sort of performance-oriented interface (e.g., piano keyboard) means that each note could be perfectly tuned to its key center - there isn't a temperament or tuning system in effect other than what is programmed - by ear, or possibly computed ratios). Of course frequencies chosen from a tuning system such as equal temperament could be used if wanted, but it's not even needed. So for each chromatic modulation, all the notes (given, that even though they aren't really chords but rather harmonics as described by @cefcephatus below) could be perfectly "tuned" because the entire song is a program to play a sequence of frequencies and durations. It's subtle but noticeable. It also makes it possible to get that cool chorus/phaser effect, such as that heard in Chronos. Seems that's why computer programmed songs like this are so bewitching. It's a true leveraging of physics of electronics and hardware, and is novel, compared to the centuries old methods of making music with instruments.
Martin Galway and Rob Hubbard are two of my musical heroes from back in the Commodore 64 era. Nothing but legendary tracks from both
The composers and the music of the C64 stands apart from all other systems of the era imho. The SID chip, as limited as it is, has a musicality to it that none of the others had.
I couldn’t begin to make a list of must listen to music from C64 games (and demos!). It was a genre of its own really.
Would love to see minds blown by the old C64 again :)
@@flekkzo RAMBO
@@flekkzo couldn't agree more, so much of the basis of my music tastes came from that little chip that could
@@robsolete23 It created some analog synth sounds that no other computers really did. Sound went towards sample, waveforms, midi, etc pretty quickly.
Imho old analogue synths sound better than the early digital systems (from expensive to cheap, except samples) as it has a different warmth to it.
It’s an underrepresented chip music genre outside of those of us that lived through it :)
I remember there was music for the C-64 which used its 3 channels to provide melodies and harmonies, and through clever combinations of modulations of the filters (or other parts of the the SID) added samples on top of it. One notable examples of this would be "To be on top"
Thank you so much for existing, and sharing your light with the world. Your channel really is one of the gems of UA-cam and I can not wait until I have my own place and a piano and I'm settled and can calmly learn how to play piano again and piano theory from you using your course. I've been introduced to so much annoyingly good music because of this channel and keep falling in love with jazz and rock over and over from so many different art landscapes. Keep going, great content Charles
The first song I heard by Tim Follin was from the game Vectron, then I realized that this guy was not just genius, but one of the most talented composers of our era. I recommend listening to his other works, up until the PS3 era.
You should check out binks sake from one piece. Still in my opinion one of the saddest piano parts especially the walking down part when he said “it isn’t right leaving just the accompaniment” really made me cry. Even though Charles might not see this comment, would mean a lot if he would at least walk through it like he does with we are and coconut mall. Love ur vids man!
Binks Brew gets me so emotional just knowing the lore behind it 😭
@@erboch7124 frfr
@@erboch7124 still recovering 😂
the voltage and the current is fixed, how do we vary the power?
answer: pulse width modulation
we can only turn the sound on or off, how do we get chords?
answer: pulse width modulation
slow clap
If you play the piano, you'll play music that does not hurt the ears!
Now even I want to play the piano now! 😂😂
It always sounds so good when Charles 'translates' it to piano!
It sounds amazing, especially the effect with the ALFO or Amplitude Low Frequency Oscillator!
I played around with the beeper of the Schneider Euro PC back in 1988. Basically the same principle as the ZX Spectrum.
I wish I knew more about music back then, but yeah, I was only 12 while I hacked away in GW-BASIC. 😀
Ahh, those were the days... I remember sitting down in Dublin, creating 8-bit game music for Atari. It was during the Troubles, but not in Belfast, etc. Our boss set up a Guinness beer machine with extras every day. So, instead of returning to our hotel, we stayed at the office and got pretty plastered every afternoon (after coding and making the music). After two months, we returned to our respective countries and then came back to repeat the same routine. :-)
You should check out tracker music and the sub-category of chip tunes. They are a direct descendant of this kind of technology/approach, with high speed arpeggios fooling the ears they are hearing chords etc.
Tracker music is awesome and impressive at times.
It's amazing the processing capability of the ZX Spectrum could run the coding needed to overcome the physical limitations of the beeper. So impressive!
Great video. I’ve been a massive fan of Tim’s amazing 1bit music since 1986. It’s been a huge inspiration for all of us in the 1bit music scene
While not quite as old as this, one of the first video games I was blown away by the music was Rastan.
The Mega Man: Battle Network series has a lot of crazy and cool music I think you'd like
Sounds like a boss fight, in the world the kid gets pulled into in the 'Take on Me' video.
Omg. This just flashed me back to when I programmed Apple Basic to play The Cure by “peeking” the memory at computer clock intervals that created the frequencies needed to play the melody of A Thousand Hours. It took me many days to figure it all out.
I wish I still had access to those programs. An accident ruined all of my disks and I lost it all in the early nineties.
I did a lot of things in Apple Basic that were supposed to require more complex languages to pull off. I did music stuff like that and even designed a functioning Japanese word processor.
All of it is gone now and I don’t remember how to do any of it.
It doesn't hurt to listen to, sounds very pleasant to my ears at least.
Man the follin brothers was just genius, the work they do for the AMIGA, ZX spectrum, Snes and NES is just awesome
He's still alive and kicking.
Mega Drive, Dreamcast
@@ToTheGAMES yeah, The last game he released is great
@@SproutyPottedPlant PSP, C64, PS3 and etc, Tim follin work in a lot of consoles, but the ones I mentioned are my favorites
@@ToTheGAMES tim is still alive, but remember this was a duo.
geoff follin, the other brother, passed away from pancreatic cancer not too long ago in may.
This literally almost bringing me to tear of from excitement while I'm in the subway from work. Wow. He's the definition of prodigy. Thanks for playing it on the piano, this was really something
Just when I thought your content couldn't get any better you end up covering the one and only Mr. Follin on the trusty ZX Spectrum.
im SUPER happy people are beginning to recognize tim follin for how great he is. i didnt grow up when he was at his peak, i was about 15 years late on that. but growing up i had a super nintendo and i played plok ALOT. he will always be my inspiration for music
Not sure how many guitar enthusiasts are going to read this, but this really reminds me of John Petrucci's (of Dream Theater fame) song entitled "Gemini" which he has said he wrote in the early 90's. Most musicians write their best material when being influenced by other instruments or sources other than their most proficient instrument. Always enjoy the great content on this channel... even if it causes ears to bleed!
This is actually a fun programming project for beginners if anybody wants to learn, because if you think about music as a series of beeps you will naturally need to learn fundamental programming concepts in order to organize and manipulate your beeps into a melody and then a song. Pretty much every language has libraries for making beeps, but I learned in python using winsound.
Ever wondered where thoughts come from?
If consciousness exists, and we receive it (which is provably true), then the signal could be a square wave, with infinite information coding creating an orthogonal sine wave.
This signal could be corrupted by a nefarious entity. Easy as pi
Hearing stories of how 8-bit era (and before) game music composers came up with these wild ideas to overcome hardware limitations of the time always blows my mind
You might as well do a tim folin episode
This is the second one he's done.
The world needs a Tim Follin box set of all his works. He didn't need to go that hard, but he did and we are better for it.
You should analyze the Crazy Bus theme
it's randomized unfortunately, there's nothing to analyze
@@metamusic64 welcome to the joke
In 1985, the ZX Spectrum 128k+ came out, which upgraded the original Spectrum with more memory, and a three channel sound-chip. It actually allowed composers to get some impressive tunes. But the original 48k model had a beeper, just one tone at a time intended, but adept programmers could do fantastic things. I always thought Tim Follin's menu music for Dark Fusion was a 128k three channel tune, it's so good. But he did it on a beeper.
Most of my fave Speccy tunes are three channel music though. Target Renegade and Renegade, Outrun, LED Storm, Rainbow Islands, Robocop (so good it was used in a Ariston Washing Machine advert), Starglider, Chase HQ, Pacmania, Hydrofool, Cybernoid 2, Escape From the Planet of the Robot Monsters, Where Time Stood Still, Saboteur 2, Switchblade, and Sanxion
Ad skip 2:28
I heard the first couple bars and was like... "Goes hard like a Tim Follin track."
I was not disappointed.
You could call it "1 bit music theory"
We NEED a full band to recreate all this music with multiple instruments. It would be absolutely amazing! This music goes so hard sometimes. Other times it’s like a melodic orchestra. A super talented band would bring this music to light in a new way
7:48 "its a sus chord"
My brain : AMOGUS
I think i have brainrot
you are not funny
bugs in your brain, even.
me when C#
TIM FOLLIN IS A LEGEND!
SO GLAD YOU FINALLY DECIDED TO COVER HIS WORK!!!
(wait, sorry, I forgot you already covered some of it xD)
Hey Charles, could you include the name for the composer (Tim Follin) in the description?
A link to your previous video about him (ua-cam.com/video/Zh-rYtmC0Y8/v-deo.html) would also be awesome for viewers that want to learn/hear more 🤍
The thing is, it's almost impossible to turn the electrical signal off before the transient rise ends in most microprocessor. However, the response beeper still have mass inertia, so it's possible to turn it off before the beeper could produce full pressure. The transient fall also has a delay, so if it's quick enough, it could be saw tooth. And also, because of electrical resistance, the signal has to be at least 60% power before the beeper diaphragm could even move, any less power, then it's just silent. So the spectrum of sound you talked about actually didn't happen in electric level, but could be in pressure level. However, no processor of that time could actually do that, and even if it could, the frequency out of human hearing range.
What he did was just using square wave and switching frequencies, it's called Frequency Modulated (FM), he can't modulate Amplitude (AM) because it only has 1 bit depth. But he can modulate frequencies into PWM carrier (Square wave) fast enough to make harmonics, just like you say playing notes fast enough and it sounds like a chord. Using PWM carrier frequency at 20.1kHz is enough for human ear. But because the nature of square wave which is composed of almost infinitely many harmonics, it it sounds noisy and hurt your ears.
You should talk about Undertale music
He has
he has 2 videos, actually! I don't remember the titles, but it's there, i'm sure!
I have no idea what you're talking about, as a general rule. I'm just here for the personality and how passionate you are about your craft! You vibing to Microsoft Excel Windows Calculator music is just a bonus.