Bytebeat collection

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There’s a series of tools around the concept of Bytebeat music, including online composers, js13kGames-themed players, and an album.

Bytebeat music (or one-liner music) was invented in September 2011. They’re generally a piece of rhythmic and somewhat melodic music with no score, no instruments, and no real oscillators. It’s simply a single-line formula 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. Since these directly output a waveform, they have great performance in compiled languages and can often be ran on even the weakest embedded devices.

Here’s the list:

• 8-bit generative composer by Paul Hayes
• Bytebeat composer by Sthephan Shinkufag
• JS13k Bytebeats player by Cody Ebberson
• MiniBytebeat player by Maxime Euzière
• 𝓜𝓲𝓷𝓑𝔂𝓽𝓮𝓼 minimal Bytebeat album in 1024 bytes by Frank Force

The album can also be listened on YouTube.