148 super intelligent dinosaur (preview)

the sid chip nom nom xp rawr. 6k. 64k. let me play around with your elektron sidstation for a night or two. did you know that the commodore 64 is “cool” and that i “love” it? that guy made ensoniq chips too. huh… chips…… 

https://www.patreon.com/noranygard 

the absolute inability to ever fully know anything. I recently learned that the earth is more than 6000 years old and stuff. sorry to be “vulnerable” but i just want to be honest and admit my mistakes :/

we just got agriculture like 12,000 years ago. this doesn't make any sense i’m FREAKING OUT. earth is so old and meanwhile i can barely figure out what happened in the 80s. lost media. deep vapor. the demoscene, the pirates, the “german spreading service” 

audio technology, pop music, sound design, culture… what’s interesting to me? people, baby. people are what’s interesting to me. is keygen music “dead”? is chiptune “over”? is video game music more pop music than pop music? 

i’m gonna do a few episodes on this crap. i want to take the time to follow rabbit holes, and learn how to pronounce mos technology. 

i first touched the c64 when i was 16 or 17. this guy named paul slocum invented software called the cynthcart that somehow made its way into my psycho teen brain. i bought it and i bought a c64 on ebay in the late 2000s. paul’s amazing band with a bad name is called “tree wave” and their ep is called cabana. i still think it’s sick as hell, check out the song called “sleep” it has this crazy my bloody valentine type vibe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jP0CAb0redQ

oh amazing check out these pictures i just found of tree wave. can’t believe i’m just seeing these for the first time: https://www.musicforlisteners.com/treewave.htm

(maybe i found the band on myspace back in the day..?)

here’s paul slocum’s cynthcart pdf: https://www.qotile.net/files/cynthcart2.0.pdf

i wanted to play the c64 alongside the ensoniq esq-1 in my band but alas i was too dumb to get it figured out at the time. here’s an example of the mssiah software, it shows how much range the sid chip has as far as its synthesizer capabilities go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EiPE5WY5PPM  

impossible mission, c64 speech, stay awhile stay forever: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1_fDwX1VVY  

im playing elden ring. im playing impossible mission. im playing the combination elden ring impossible mission.  

october 1982 commodore 64 datasheet: http://archive.6502.org/datasheets/mos_6581_sid.pdf

“Two A/D converters are provided for inter-facing SID with potentiometers. These can be used for ‘paddles’ in a game environment or as front panel controls in a music synthesizer, SID can process external audio signals, allowing multiple SID chips to be daisychained or mixed in complex polyphonic systems.”  

podcast interview with mark barton, the programmer behind sam the software automatic mouth: https://archive.org/details/Mark-Barton-Software-Automatic-Mouth/Mark+Barton+320.mp3  

email interview by a student at the vienna university of technology with robert yannes of mos technology, commodore 64, ensoniq: https://web.archive.org/web/20070222065716/http://stud1.tuwien.ac.at/~e9426444/yannes.html 

some key quotes from that interview:  

“I thought the sound chips on the market (including those in the Atari computers) were primitive and obviously had been designed by people who knew nothing about music.”  

“When I designed the SID chip, I was attempting to create a single-chip synthesizer voice which hopefully would find it's way into polyphonic/polytimbral synthesizers.”  

“The SID chip was my first attempt at a phase-accumulating oscillator, which is the heart of all wavetable synthesis systems.”  

“the Oscillator is a 24-bit phase-accumulating design of which the lower 16-bits are programmable for pitch control”  

sound interface device.  

some computer i hate! this computer? i love you.