This Music Literally Hurts Your Ears But It Sounds SO GOOD

Music like this should not have even been possible.

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[CharlesCornellStudios]

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.

[BaggyCatEntertainment]

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!

[onidaaitsubasa]

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.

[hexamirofficial]

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.

[TheTunneys]

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!

[AcrosArchive]

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.

[Angel_Bob_]

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

[antivanti]

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

[DPDK]

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.

[M_Alexander]

Tim Follin is so talented that it sounds like this music was composed for more complex devices that are malfunctioning as they play it

[dmitryurbanovich]

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).

[kalowealt]

Can't believe he's covering 1-Bit music now

[pakkanen]

Chris Hüelsbeck, Rob Hubbard, Ben Daglish, Jeroen Tel, Antony Crowther just to name few.
Pioneers who had more influence than they never imagined.

[ordie]

Tim Follin is a genius. Bionic Commando's soundtrack sounds worlds better than the arcade.. He's next level.

[rdxdt]

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

[cactustactics]

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

[megahornet]

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.

[bfishryuhayabusa]

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.

[jabelsjabels]

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!

[Phendrena]

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)