Shiru
Offline
Russia, Moscow

PC Speaker was one of earliest and most primitive sound devices of personal computers, intended to produce very basic system beeps. It is only capable to play single voice of square wave without any volume or timbre control. This album reveals some hidden potential of this little device that remained pretty much unexplored due to rapid progress in the computer technology back in the day.

Listen at Bandcamp: https://shiru8bit.bandcamp.com/album/system-beeps
Watch on Youtube: https://youtu.be/tUy1MEpqbvk
Run on your MS-DOS machine (also check out sb.txt for some insights): http://shiru.untergrund.net/files/system_beeps.zip
Get all sources and project files: http://shiru.untergrund.net/files/system_beeps_src.zip

One of unusual qualities of this release is that it has been produced in a modern DAW (Reaper), yet targets real PC Speaker. You can achieve the same using my free plugins and stuff: http://shiru.untergrund.net/software.shtml#daw

Zuberi
Offline
Argentina

excellent!

kvee
Offline
Praha, Czech republic

oh this is great!
and the artwork rocks as well! :]

freezedream
Offline
Adelaide, Australia

Nice beeps! Thanks for all the link, too!

Doctor Octoroc
Offline
Philadelphia

Thoroughly impressed with this! I haven't ventured outside of 4 and 5 channel chips but I use these techniques on single channels a lot. Crazy that you did all this with just the one monophonic square. What other parameters do you have access to for this? Duty cycle? Pitch? Anything else?

Last edited by Doctor Octoroc (Jan 30, 2019 2:56 am)

Shiru
Offline
Russia, Moscow

Yes, PC Speaker has just one channel of pure square wave without volume control, that's all you hear in this album. Perceived polyphony here is just an advanced music arrangement trickery.

Shiru
Offline
Russia, Moscow

Wrote an in-depth 'making of' article: https://habr.com/en/post/439192/