TechStuff Tidbits: 8-Bit Audio

rooted in nostalgia do this a lot. So I thought it would be cool to talk about something that occasionally becomes trendy, and that is eight bit music or chip dunes, and these are things that often find their way into various types of pop culture. Sometimes there's a resurgence in the style. Sometimes music will reference this kind of stuff,

either directly or indirectly. But first we got to figure out what the heck we're talking about, right, Well, we're really talking about that distinctive kind of electronic music that sounds like it came straight from a classic video game, perhaps in the old Nintendo Entertainment System era. Really, the NES era is like the golden age for the eight bits sound. It would sound something like this that was cannon indeed for eight bits. Since by Kevin McLeod, you've

likely heard a lot of McLeod's work online. His website incompatach is a popular source for royalty free music. This particular our piece really touches on the features that make eight bit music distinctive. Now, there's one thing that we really should clear up right away. The reason music like what you just heard sounds the way it sounds is not specifically because the chip responsible was an eight bit chip.

The eight bit designation tells us that the chip is able to store and process a maximum of eight bits per data block, and a bit, just to remind you, is the basic unit of digital information. It can be represented as a zero, or as a one or off and on. As I often say, now, if you have eight bits strung together, you can represent up to two hundred fifty six different values from zero up to two hundred fifty five. Now, the eight bit designation really did

have a big impact on software. It limited what you could do graphically and computationally. But really, when it comes to the sound generated by systems like the classic in ne s, the factors that shape that sound weren't directly tied to the fact that the chip set had an eight bit word size capability to them, but the reason for that distinctive sound is really due to the microchips used in classic gaming consoles and the types of sounds

that they were capable of generating. For example, the AT had a chip called the Television Interface Adapter or t i A or TIAH. This chip was responsible for quite a few jobs. Actually, it served as the interface for inputs coming into the console from the controllers, so, in other words, it was what was responsible for making pac Man go up when you pushed up on the joystick. It was also responsible for generating what you saw on your television and screen, and it was also in charge

of generating sound effects. The Autary had two oscillator channels, essentially to audio channels, and it was really limited in what it was able to produce. One channel was essentially a pulse channel which could produce different tones, and the other channel was a noise channel. You couldn't really program sophisticated music on it without jumping through a lot of programming hoops in order to play a specific note. By using the pulse channel to play two D tuned notes

and quick succession. So, in other words, rather than being able to produce, say like a middle C, you're producing tones that are a little below and a little above middle C, and you're alternating them very quickly, and the vibrato effect makes us perceive a warbly middle C note. The noise channel would generate noise that would serve as percussion. It was pretty jankie for that reason. The vast majority

of a hundred games had no background music. They might have a little bit of intro music, and there were a couple of exceptions, notable ones. In fact, Pitfall two, for example, had an actual game soundtrack, and not only that, the soundtrack was dynamic, which meant the music would change

depending upon what was going on in the game. This was a pretty tough thing to pull off from a programming standpoint back in those days, simply due to the limitations of the hardware, and in a way, those limitations ended up being a big part of what makes eight bit and chip tune music so distinctive. The limitations forced musicians to find ways to be creative and expressive within

very tight boundaries. Now, sometimes restrictions lead creative types to do amazing work for at least some types of creatives, being unbounded ends up being kind of a drawback. If you're told they're limitations and you have nothing to push against.

Then for a lot of creative people, including myself, it can actually paralyze you because you realize like there are no like when when there are no limitations and everything is on the table, you have to choose what you do, whereas restrictions limit your options, and it actually can make it easier to create. It seems counterintuitive, but for many people that is the case for myself included. So restrictions

and boundaries create certain rules that you can play around within. Now, in the arcades, it was a different story from video game consoles. An arcade machine has a lot of specific circuitry. So your basic classic arcade machine is designed to play one game and that's it. All the circuits in the arcade machine are the actual game itself. It's not running a program off a disk or a cartridge or a digital file. The actual game is hard coded on the

ships and circuitry. But arcade machines could incorporate multiple sound chips to increase the number of audio channels available and thus produced more sophisticated music. One very early example of such a game was a game called Vanguard, which came out way back in The crazy thing about Vanguard from a music perspective, anyway, is that it was one of the first arcade games to make use of licensed music.

For one thing, it used a bit of the theme from Star Trek, the motion picture that would end up being the same motif that would be used later on in Star Trek the next generation. It also incorporated a motif from the nineteen eighty film Flash Gordon, which had a killer soundtrack composed by the band Queen. Specifically, the game has a chip Tunes version of Voltan's theme from

the movie, and it totally rules. Now, these chips could produce certain types of wave forms of audience, and typically these chips were very limited in that they could produce only one kind of wave form per chip, or per audio channel I should say, not chip, but audio channel. So let's talk a bit about oscillators and signals and waveforms. Now. First off, an oscillator is essentially an electronic circuit that

generates a continuous output signal and that's it. We typically see that output in the form of some sort of repeating curve or sinusoid. If you have familiarity with trigonometry, you likely are familiar with sinusoidal waves or sine waves. You've got a triggonometric function that, when plotted on a graph, generates this wave. Now, a simple sinusoidal wave produces waves that are equal length and amplitude. This is very simple.

This is like if you're produce saying a steady unaltered signal, Like if you were just to produce the electronic equivalent of a C note, so you would have the steady frequency of identical waves. The frequency refers to the number of waves that pass a given point within a given amount of time. And we can plot sound waves like this too. Like electronic waves, we can plot this way,

and sound waves we can plot this way. So that C note where you have a regular pitch and it's like a pure C note, there's no vibrato going on here. You're gonna have a a side wave plotted to represent this sound wave where you have this very smooth curve where you have uh waves that are each the same wave length and they're all the same amplitude or height, which means it's all played at the same volume. The way we hear it, and it would be very pretty

and neat. It would also be boring to listen to. UM. If you were to change the pitch of a sound, well, then that would mean that the frequency would go up and the wavelength of the waves would decrease, so you would have shorter waves and more waves would pass a given point within a certain amount of time, So the

frequency increases lower pitches. It's the opposite. The waves would be longer and fewer would pass a given point in time UM or a given point within a given amount of time, I should say, and thus you would have a lower pitch. But with electronic oscillators, we can produce lots of different shapes of waves, and those different shapes can correspond with different sounds in the case of audio chips,

that is. Keep in mind that continuous signals can be used to produce all sorts of different stuff, not just audio. So when we come back, we'll talk about these different waveforms and what they can be used to do. But first let's take this quick break. Okay we're now. I Am not going to do a full deep dive into all the different kinds of waves that oscillators can produce.

Because that would be a podcast all by itself. But let's talk about the basic forms that you found in say the nes You know, the different audio channels and what they could produce and what those sound like. So in the case of electronic audio and synthesized audio, the shape of the wave form determines the timbre or character of a sound, the tone. So one type of wave form that's really important in the eight bit sound genre is the square wave. Square wave forms and electronics are

often used for stuff like clock timing signals. A sign wave, like I said, has a smooth curve, so it it rises and reaches a peak and then descends in a very smooth fashion. Square waves go from the zero point and they jump straight up to whatever they're a alitude ends up being for however long the wavelength is, so there's no curve. It just goes from zero and then jumps straight up to whatever the amplitude is, stays that way for the length of the wave, and then drops

right back down to zero. So they look like squares when you plot them on a graph, Thus the name square wave. Now, in digital audio, that kind of wave produces those chirpy beep noises we think about with eight bit or chip tune music. So these wave forms are typically used to create the sounds used to generate a melody in a musical piece in a video game. So, uh, you usually do this in order to create the main

melodic theme of whatever the pieces. The Nintendo Entertainment System or the NES had two channels capable of producing square waves, and by using both of the channels at the same time, you could create warbly vibrato sound. You know, you could have one channel producing one pitch and the second channel producing a different pitch, and then you could you know, slightly offset them so you would get that warbly sound.

Or you could even create a melody and harmony together and program each of those those uh lines of of data to produce different squares on their square waves. Now, next up we have triangle waves. Triangle waves. Hate person waves. They have a fight, triangle wins triangle waves. And yeah, well, these triangle waves, when you plot on a graph or you display it on a monitor, they look like triangles.

The wave rises very sharply to a point and then immediately descends afterward, and so they're not it's not straight up and down like a square wave. It's at an angle, but it's at a sharp angle, so they look like triangles. Uh. These typically come in as a softer sound than square waves do, and they very often were used to generate a baseline for video game music, so you would produce lower pitched sounds. The NES third audio channel was dedicated

to creating triangle waves. So if you're keeping count, the NES had two channels that would produce square waves, typically for melody maybe harmony, and then a third one that

was used to produce triangle waves for the baselines. Then then e S had a noise channel, and that would produce noise, which really just means a signal that contains a certain range of frequencies, all the frequencies within a given spectrum, and all those frequencies would all be played at the same amplitude or volume, so there's no note in noise. Or you could say there are all the notes within a given spectrum that are all played at the same volume, so you can't pick any single note

out and it just becomes noise. UM. I associate noise with static, but then I also realized this is something that dates me because these days you don't encounter static in the wild anymore. Right, it's you as an effect in many cases, but it's not like you you're switching channels on your television and you hit static and you get that noise. Anyway, noise was usually used to create percussive beats for a song, so the NESS fourth audio channel would do just that. It was used as a

percussion track. The NES also had a fifth audio channel which was dedicated to playing very short clips of sampled sounds. So these were sounds that you could record in the real world and play back in a digitized format. And this channel could playback stuff that included digitized speech. Now Here is where that eight bit limitation actually does come in. In the previous examples, we're really talking about the wave form being what is important to create that distinctive eight

bit audio. But when it comes to digitized speech, the eight bit limitation actually plays a big part in it. Uh. If you listen to digitized speech from the NES era, you're gonna hear there's a lot of noise introduced in that speech. Like it's not a clear recording. Uh. If you were a fan of the classic Gauntlet games, I'm talking about the original versions of Gauntlet, not like remasters

or anything. You probably remember there was a digitized voice with a lot of noise in it that would say things like red war here, your life force is running out, or green Elf shot the food because the digitized narrator of that game was a total snitch. Anyway, if you remember what that sounded like, you remember there was this noisy element to the speech, and again that was largely because of the limitations of a bit technology that would

improve over time. So when we get to stuff like chip tunes or modern music that replicates the sound of these video games, we're really talking about musicians using digital instruments or in computer workstations to generate those classic wave forms from the nes video game era and thereabouts, the triangle waves and the square waves. It's not about slapping an eight bit chip into a digital amplifier or something. It's rather creating those very specific, continuous signals in order

to get the sounds you want. Uh. They sound pretty darn cool if you ask me. But I'm also a guy who's going into his late forties, so it really hits a nostalgic place for yours truly. Anyway, I thought it would be interesting to kind of touch on what makes those sounds unique and what gives them the quality that we associate with them. And I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you have suggestions for future topics, feel

free to reach out to me. One way you can do that is on Twitter the handle for the show's tech Stuff hs W. Another thing you could do is you can go to the I Heart Radio app and use the talk back feature on the tech stuff page and let me know. In fact, if there's a specific like classic video games soundtrack that you really love, like there's something in that eight bit music genre that speaks to you, I want to hear which one is your favorite?

Because I have my favorites. I don't want to influence anybody else. I really want to hear, and maybe it'll be a game I'm not familiar with, and I'll get to discover music that I really love that I've never heard before. So if you have suggestions like that, use that talkback feature. You can record a sound clip of up to thirty seconds and I will see it in our little dashboard and I'll be able to listen to it. And heck, if we get enough cool responses, I can

even include those in the future episode. All right, that's it. Hope you have a great day. I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.