Songs I Made

I some times make music. You might like it. I upload songs to my soundcloud.

bytebeat

Bytebeat is a experimental kind of music that is generated programmatically. The best description I've seen is here

Brief summary of bytebeat

In short, a loop in a program (in my case always written in C, so far) outputs bytes, which are interpreted as raw audio samples. That audio can be used raw as a song, reencoded into something more typical (e.g. mp3), or as input to further processing.

bytebeat a

For this song, I took the audio created by the program and recorded it to a cassette and then redigitized it. This was in an attempt to soften the harsh tones of the audio, which I think was somewhat successful.

Even with the brush with analog, it's an intense song, a bit of a non stop wall of sound. I generally like harsh and noisy music, so really bytebeat is right up my alley. In bytebeat a, I like the rythyms within the noise, and patterns my brain can latch on to, but it's still not all repetition.

How it was made

The program that generated this audio is the following:

int main(void) {
	int t;
	for(;;t++) {putchar((((t & t<<1) & (0xFF << t/2)) >> t/2) ^ (t & (t<<1)));}
}

The output from this was saved to a file and interpreted as unsigned 8-bit audio at 8000 samples/second. This can be achieved on linux by handing the file to aplay, which defaults to those settings. There's nothing special about the program that makes it fit for that interpretation, it's fairly arbitrary. Different sample sizes and rates will generate different sounds. As previously mentioned this audio was recorded to type II cassette, and then redigitized. This pass through an analog medium was how the raw audio samples got encoded into a normal format (in this case FLAC).