Music Visualizer
One more demo: I wrote a music visualizer to show off the AY chip tunes, and also converted a bunch more AY songs for use with BMOW. Now there’s something cool to look at while you listen to that glorious 8-bit music!
The visualizer shows blue, yellow, and green bars for the three voices of the AY-3-8913. The bar’s horizontal position shows the voice’s frequency, and the bar’s height shows the amplitude. The fourteen hex numbers at the bottom are the real-time values of the AY control registers.
The Agent X II track that I used in my first audio demo shows this off pretty well. You can easily pick out which instrument is which voice, and see some of the auditory tricks used, just by watching the visualizer.
Here’s another AY tune running with the visualizer. This one’s called “Power M”, and was evidently written by a guy on speed. Just try to follow the voices! It’s all a blur. Forget it.
Incidentally, this is also the first BMOW demo to show any kind of animation, tame as it is.
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Yes, spot the difference between the traditional music player routine that tends to rely on the audio chip to produce waveforms and the modern music player that uses a great deal of multiplexing to generate complex sounds.
I think I missed your meaning. Are you comparing the two videos I posted here, or old player hardware (like BMOW) to a modern software MP3 player like WinAmp?
I included the “Power M” example because it seems to make heavy use of arpeggios and multiplexing of a single voice to simulate additional voices.
Oh I mean by comparing the two videos. You can see in the “Power M” piece that is uses lots of arpeggios, slides, frequency wobbles and multiplexing. The first piece on the other hand does not make much use of any effects except those supplied by the sound chip itself.
PURE AWESOME!
Hey, it’s Tim Follin, not Tom
By the way, what is this running on?