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.
HTML5 Game Developer, Enclave Games indie studio founder, js13kGames competition creator and Gamedev.js Weekly newsletter publisher. Mozilla Tech Speaker, Gamedev.js community firestarter. Organizes meetups / workshops / hackathons in Poland, passionate about new, Open Web technologies, excited about WebXR and PWAs. Likes eating sushi and playing Neuroshima Hex.