We've all played Super Mario, Excitebike and Contra, and we've all heard the really catchy songs, but how do they make them? I'm talking, of course, about 8 bit Audio!
Believe it or not, that's the same principle used when converting analog audio to digital audio! Since you can't store an infinite number of samples on a finite space of memory, we go along the waveform of the song and at certain intervals of time, we 'sample' it.
And we store just the values at those points, and the time between each 'sample'. So now, we can reconstruct the entire waveform!
Of course, to store these values in computers and digital media; we store them in our memory chips, in the form of bits.
We know that a 'bit' is the most basic unit of information or computing in digital devices. It's actually the status of a switch.
A switch can either be 'ON' or 'OFF'. We use this binary system because we have these tiny electronically controllable switches called transistors. These transistor switches are so frikkin small these days, that modern graphics cards have more than 3 billion of them!
On a side note, the field of Quantum Computing is gaining some ground, of late. The idea is a bit can either be 1 or 0, but a qubit can be in ANY NUMBER OF STATES.
I don't even know what that means yet, but the evil geniuses at Google and NASA are getting together to try things, as explained in this vague yet entertaining video.
So anyway, the idea is, more the number of bits per sample, more the different 'versions' of samples that can be stored. It's like, having two coins, there are only four ways of arranging them, but having three coins gives you EIGHT ways of arranging them. Just like that, having eight bits to represent a sample would mean you have 28= 256 different types of samples! And that's a good thing as you can see from the from the following picture:
So we can see that from the very blurry picture above, that the more number of bits you use to store a sample, the more 'faithful' the output wave shape is to the original wave shape.
The first video games tried to use cassette tape or other ways to produce the background score, but these were prone to breakage and everything, so they decided to store the music on special chips. These chips had the samples stored in them, and the samples were accessed as needed, sent to a Digital To Analog Converter and they were probably amplified and sent to a speaker.
Highly recommend you listening to this as you read this post :P
So what is 8 Bit Audio?
8 Bit audio is a method of recording, storing and playing audio. The 8 in 8 bits stands for the number of bits assigned to each sample.
To get samples, you need to sample the original song.
'Sampling' is almost exactly like it sounds like; Imagine there's a long buffet line, and some of it looks great, but you are never going to be able to eat everything on the buffet line.. So what you do is, you walk from the beginning to the end, trying out just a little bit of everything that you like and then you give it a score in your head.Believe it or not, that's the same principle used when converting analog audio to digital audio! Since you can't store an infinite number of samples on a finite space of memory, we go along the waveform of the song and at certain intervals of time, we 'sample' it.
 |
| The blue dots, are the samples, and 'T' is the time between each sample |
And we store just the values at those points, and the time between each 'sample'. So now, we can reconstruct the entire waveform!
Of course, to store these values in computers and digital media; we store them in our memory chips, in the form of bits.
We know that a 'bit' is the most basic unit of information or computing in digital devices. It's actually the status of a switch.
A switch can either be 'ON' or 'OFF'. We use this binary system because we have these tiny electronically controllable switches called transistors. These transistor switches are so frikkin small these days, that modern graphics cards have more than 3 billion of them!
On a side note, the field of Quantum Computing is gaining some ground, of late. The idea is a bit can either be 1 or 0, but a qubit can be in ANY NUMBER OF STATES.
I don't even know what that means yet, but the evil geniuses at Google and NASA are getting together to try things, as explained in this vague yet entertaining video.
So anyway, the idea is, more the number of bits per sample, more the different 'versions' of samples that can be stored. It's like, having two coins, there are only four ways of arranging them, but having three coins gives you EIGHT ways of arranging them. Just like that, having eight bits to represent a sample would mean you have 28= 256 different types of samples! And that's a good thing as you can see from the from the following picture:
 | ||
| Picture taken from a book called Introduction to Audio By Peter Utz |
So we can see that from the very blurry picture above, that the more number of bits you use to store a sample, the more 'faithful' the output wave shape is to the original wave shape.
The first video games tried to use cassette tape or other ways to produce the background score, but these were prone to breakage and everything, so they decided to store the music on special chips. These chips had the samples stored in them, and the samples were accessed as needed, sent to a Digital To Analog Converter and they were probably amplified and sent to a speaker.
These are the songs that we've all heard throughout our childhood(s?) and people still love them now! There's a whole mainstream genre called Chiptunes. And they are simply awesome.
One of the most popular chiptunes bands out there is Anamanaguci:
But really my favourite 8 bit song is this version of Aces High by Iron Maiden :D
And you can find the 8 bit version of pretty much any song on Youtube, so go out and discover your favourite 8 bit songs my readers(?)!
Speaking of songs from video games, today's #CheckItOut song is Derezzed by Daft Punk, from the OST of the movie Tron: Legacy
and here's the 8 Bit version. ;)
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