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Comment by tosser0001

7 years ago

When I was a teenager in Massachusetts in 1982 I bought the album "Tragic Figures" by a band called Savage Republic on a lark, based solely on the hand-printed album cover. It turned out to be very strange post-punk industrial music. I almost fell out of my chair at the movie theater watching "Silence of the Lambs" when the song "Real Men" from that album came on.

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tosser0001

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twic  7 years ago

There's an amazing demo called 'A Mind Is Born':

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWblpsLZ-O8

Amazing principally because the whole thing is 256 bytes:

https://linusakesson.net/scene/a-mind-is-born/

I never meet anyone who has even heard of the demoscene, let alone come seen this particular work.

I was at a film festival watching a programme of short films, one of which was the well-made AI-box escape romp 'Watch Room':

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=th5uJNB7VU8

And similarly found my interface with my seat disrupted by the closing credits using the music from 'A Mind Is Born'. This being a festival, the director was there, so i could tell him how much i appreciated the reference!

  • throwaway_pdp09  7 years ago

    Sadly Andrey Kolmogorov is dead. Because I'd loooove to see his face.

    Fantastic, solid thanks for that, I love it for what it is.

    Edit: technical question for audiologists. The underlying pulsing heartbeat of this track, which is most clear right at the start, has a kind of 'furry' quality to it. How is this done? I guess it's a sample of a ~60Hz sine wave but I'm just guessing.

    • egypturnash  7 years ago

      It’s a c64, there are no samples*.

      https://linusakesson.net/scene/a-mind-is-born/ has a full breakdown of what is going on.

      What you call the “heartbeat” is, I think, what Linus thinks of as “drums”, and is a rapidly descending tone in (probably) a rectangular wave - the c64 cannot generate sine waves, just sawtooth/triangle/pulse, and random noise (and some combinations of these that were not intended by the sound chip’s designer). In addition all three voices of the sound chip are being pushed through its subtractive filter, which is a hard-to-emulate bit of analog circuitry that gets noisier and noisier if you out more than one voice through it.

      If you really want a close look at what’s going on you could download the “SID tune” version of it and run it through a c64 music player, most of these have oscilloscope views and the ability to selectively mute voices.