Alive Dead Media 2020: Tracker and Chip Music 1st day introduction, Markku Reunanen Pics gracefully provided by Wikimedia Commons Arrangements See MyCourses for more details, but for now: ● Whoami, who’s here? ● Schedule of this week: history, MilkyTracker with Yzi, LSDJ with Miranda Kastemaa, holiday, final concert ● 80% attendance, two tunes for the final concert and a little jingle today ● Questions about the practicalities? History of Home Computer and Game Console Audio ● This is a vast subject: hundreds of different devices and chips starting from the late 1970s ● In the 1990s starts to become increasingly standardized (or boring, if you may :) so we’ll focus on earlier technology ● Not just hardware: how did you compose music with contemporary tools? ● Let’s hear a lot of examples – not using Zoom audio The Home Computer Boom ● At its peak in the 1980s, but started somewhat earlier with Apple II (1977), TRS-80 (1977) and Commodore PET (1977) ● Affordable microprocessors, such as Zilog Z80, MOS 6502 and the Motorola 6800 series ● In the 1980s the market grew rapidly with Commodore VIC-20 (1980) and C-64 (1982), Sinclair ZX Spectrum (1982), MSX compatibles (1983) … and many more! ● From enthusiast gadgets to game machines Enter the 16-bits ● Improving processors: Motorola 68000 series, Intel 8088/8086/80286 ● More colors, more speed, more memory, from tapes to floppies, mouse(!) ● Atari ST (1984), Commodore Amiga (1985), Apple Macintosh (1984) ● IBM PC and compatibles (1981) popular in the US, improving game capability Not Just Computers ● The same technology powered game consoles of the time ● Notable early ones: Fairchild Channel F (1976), Atari VCS aka. 2600 (1977), Mattel Intellivision (1979) ● “Video Game Crash” of 1983 ● In the 1980s Nintendo NES (1983), Sega Master System (1985) and Mega Drive (1988) ● Connection to synthesizers and popular music of the time Basic Waveforms Noise ● Random noise is also a common waveform on sound chips, it’s just not regular unlike the previous examples ● Useful for percussion instruments, such as snares and hi-hat, sound effects Beyond the Beeps ● By playing the waveform at different frequencies we get notes. The larger the amplitude, the louder the sound. ● Modifying the frequency and amplitude (i.e. volume) on the fly gives character to the sound ● Turning a waveform simply on and off makes for mechanistic beeps, as real-world sounds aren’t like that ● So-called envelopes control how the volume behaves: fading in and out at different stages. ADSR is one of the simplest ones. Attack, Decay, Sustain, Release Experiment with Waves and ADSR ● https://www.keithmcmillen.com/blog/making-music-in-th e-browser-web-audio-midi-envelope-generator/ ● Let’s try in practice how different basic waveforms sound like and how applying ADSR changes them ● Might not work on Chrome, try Firefox or some other browser Real-World Sounds Example of speech from the Aalto University Wiki Let There Be Sound! ● Sound was not a priority on the earliest computers – some didn’t even have any sound capabilities ● Not necessarily for games, but for warning beeps ● Game consoles, obviously, were a different ballgame ● Rate generators – one or multiple channels of square wave audio ● Usually just one feature of a clock chip ● A capacitor filters the sound and rounds it ● Often just 8 bits (256 different values) for the frequency The PC Speaker ● For long the standard PC sound device ● One-channel square wave audio from the clock chip, no volume control, just the frequency ● Quite different implementations across machines ● Tricks: arpeggio, vibrato, even digitized audio using Pulse-Code Modulation (computationally expensive) ● https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzfDOD4q0Kk ● https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izadA3nSPbk ● https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wivtSeGr_T8 At Times not Even That ● Sinclair ZX Spectrum – a popular British home computer (1982) ● Commonly used for games, but: no sound chip, not even a rate generator ● The processor can switch the output on or off: even continuous beeping is heavy. Small internal speaker. ● Pulse-Width Modulation (PWM), interleaving ● https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BgUzteADsRI ● https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lacCH2h70w Programmable Sound Generators ● Separate sound chips with features like: multiple channels (3 typical), volume control, different waveforms, envelopes ● Still not possible to play digitized audio directly: processor-intensive ramping of volume up and down, amplitude modulation possible ● Used on most 8-bit home computers and game consoles ● Chip music usually refers to this era, either the real hardware or just the general style General Instrument AY-3-8910 ● Or simply just “PSG” ● A typical representative of its kind: three square-wave channels, volume, noise and envelopes ● MSX Compatibles, Sinclair ZX Spectrum 128k, Amstrad CPC, Intellivision, but also the 16-bit Atari ST ● https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TB3j8rlQrU ● https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohxzj7rBTDg MOS Sound Interface Device (SID) ● Used on the Commodore 64 ● Two models: 6581 and 8580 ● More capable than most PSGs: selectable waveforms, ADSR envelopes, variable pulse width, programmable analog filter and more ● Plenty of famous tunes and composers (see HVSC) ● https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhQIotlAxW8 ● https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6xhfDLaVtU ● Couldn’t get a SID composer to teach this week, sorry :) Meanwhile in Japan... ● Well, not just Japan, but rather typically so :) ● Frequency modulation (FM) based chips by Yamaha ● A selection of (sine-based) waveforms whose frequency is modulated by another oscillator ● Complex devices with effects and ADSR envelopes ● Many Japanese arcades, Sega Mega Drive, but also Adlib and SoundBlaster sound cards for the PC computers ● https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2aaSG3ICd0 Enter the Amiga ● Commodore’s 16-bit machine (1985), Amiga 500 (1987) very popular in Europe ● Extensive graphics and sound capabilities for the time ● Paula sound chip: no built-in waveforms, but 4 channels of 8-bit digital (PCM) audio with frequency and volume setting ● Stereo sound ● Real instruments from synthesizers, instruments and your favorite albums ● At times called wavetable synthesis Amiga (cont.) ● The tracker paradigm dominant on the Amiga, tightly reflects the hardware capabilities ● Used for professional music production too ● Digitized samples use much more memory than chip music, Amiga typically had one megabyte(!) ● Playing speech or other “real” sounds no more difficult but a standard feature ● https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLMhBE99byM ● https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hzx8imUo9kU And Then ● From 8 to 16-bit samples, CD quality ● Amiga-like wavetable cards enjoyed a momentary success in the mid-1990s: Gravis UltraSound (1992) and SoundBlaster AWE32 (1994) ● Quickly growing processing power made wavetable chips obsolete ● Now simple chips that can just play back digital samples ● Intel’s AC’97 standard (1997): surround sound and 48 kHz sampling rate Making Music ● What about tools? How did you compose music? ● Initially no particular tools, game music was commonly composed by programming in machine language in the mid-1980s ● https://www.1xn.org/text/C64/rob_hubbards_music.txt ● The musician was often an external person ● Some home computers let users do simple music using the built-in BASIC programming language (=main user interface of the machine) Back to 1983 ● We’re sitting at the living room with our shiny new MSX computer and trying to make it play music ● WebMSX emulator: https://webmsx.org/ ● Create music using the play command ● Use an external text editor (not Word or Google Docs) to edit the command and then copy it with alt-b to the emulator – or just use the text box directly ● When done, copy paste it to the Drive Music Macro Language ● Basic syntax: play"notes","notes","notes" (you can have up to 3 channels playing) ● Quotation marks must be like this: " ● Notes: cdefgab, # can be used for sharp notes ● Specify the length with a number: c4, 1=full note, 2=half note and so on ● Much more here, if needed: https://www.msx.org/wiki/PLAY Concert ● Let’s listen to what the others have composed ● Copy paste from the Google Doc and try to figure out how they did it Emerging Tools Soundmonitor (1986) by Chris Hülsbeck for the C-64 The Tracker Paradigm ● The roots of the tracker composing paradigm can be seen on Soundmonitor already ● Trackers evolved considerably on the Commodore Amiga and were the dominant way of making music, both in the hobbyist and professional circles ● Particularly characteristic software for the demoscene community ● Tomorrow you’ll get to try MilkyTracker yourself. ● https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKvreHmHKds Tracker Basics The Ultimate Soundtracker (1987) by Karsten Obarski Another Tracker FastTracker II (1994) by Triton for the PC Trackers Now and Then ● Trackers are still alive, in particular when composing for retro computers ● Cross-development: using a powerful modern computer for composing for an old one ● Not that typical in professional audio ● Renoise represents the current top of the line, a full commercial digital audio workstation: https://www.renoise.com/ That’s it! This was pretty much it for the first day. Any questions with regard to… ● History of home computers or game consoles? ● Sound chips? ● Trackers? ● Further readings or links? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIEijimuzr8 – chiptune scandal(!).