Bytebeat music (or one-liner music) was invented in September 2011. Simple bytebeats are often a piece of rhythmic and somewhat melodic music with no score, no instruments, and no real oscillators. It's simply an expression that defines a waveform as a function of time, processed (usually) 8000 times per second, resulting in an audible waveform with a 256-step resolution from silence (0) to full amplitude (256). If you put that formula into a program with a loop that increments time variable (t), you can generate the headerless unsigned 8 bit mono 8kHz audio stream on output, like in this application. Since these directly output a waveform, they have great performance in compiled languages and can often be ran on even the weakest embedded devices.
This webpage has a collection of bytebeat music found by SthephanShi, I may add my own compositions here too. Playback modes are:
- Bytebeat — expected output is 0 to 255, values outside this are wrapped, and non-integers are floored.
- Signed Bytebeat — expected output is -128 to 127, values outside this are wrapped, and non-integers are floored. This is an uncommon format, which comes from c allowing char to be signed or unsigned depending on the compiler.
- Floatbeat — expected output is -1.0 to 1.0, values outside this are clipped. This allows higher quality audio, and is common for other generative music.
- Funcbeat — based on TinyRave, code is not an expression, and is only ran once. The returned function is ran with time in seconds.
This website is a fork of bytebeat-composer by SthephanShi, which itself is a fork of 8-bit Generative Composer by @paul_hayes.
Forked by SArpnt.