Formula Too Complex

September 9, 2024 5:39 AM

Machine Yearning is a 26 minute demo album by Linus A which consists of just 4096 bytes of machine code. You can read how it was made here. This follows on A Mind is Born, an infamous 256 byte demo. [previously]

Bonus piano midi cover of A Mind is Born, which kinda slaps.

posted by kaibutsu (11 comments total)

Makes me think of MS2, given its minimal genome.
posted by nat at 5:59 AM on September 9 [1 favorite]

I don't know what I expected, but these melodies are good. The "voice" of the machine is very 1980s synth, but it's very nice stuff.

(Note: not anti-electronica-ist.)
posted by wenestvedt at 6:29 AM on September 9

The SID chip in the Commodore 64 was considered far ahead of the competition when it came out, and it is still highly regarded and often sought out today! It has analog circuitry with digital controls, which is interestingly again a very popular design choice in 2024.

I was pleasantly surprised at how well this came out. I have a barely-used C64 (in its original box!) in my basement and I've been telling myself some day I'll set it up so I can make music with the SID. This gives me inspiration, thanks!
posted by SaltySalticid at 7:02 AM on September 9 [3 favorites]

The music is very cool. Just a note: very strong photosensitive epilepsy warning. Like if you have a seizure disorder at all, of any kind, maybe stay away or close your eyes or whatever.
posted by The Bellman at 8:59 AM on September 9 [2 favorites]

Wow cool! I listen to A Mind is Born about once a month, even without the visuals the music is just remarkably good on its own. Nevermind for how tiny the program is. I see there's just the one visual effect here in this album. But then again it's 3 bytes per second of music, I'll allow it.

Having 2 SIDs is a clever hack to allow more complex music. Also love this:

Finally, a word on the titles. As you may have guessed, these are error messages from the C64 ROM. Relying on strings from the ROM makes the program a little bit smaller, and every byte counts. But there is also a symbolic value in using these titles: There isn't much text in the C64 ROM—again because of size constraints—and what's there is mostly concerned with cases where something has gone wrong. So if there's a soul in this machine, it seems to be a troubled soul, disconsolate and wistful. Since I had to compose the music to fit the available song titles, the machine has influenced the creative process not only with technical constraints, but also by this wistfulness, this machine yearning, that sets the emotional tone of the entire album.

posted by Nelson at 9:07 AM on September 9 [3 favorites]

You can do a lot with linear-feedback shift registers.

And yeah, there are a heck of a lot of error messages in ROM and basically zero "success" messages. No wonder Gen X is so messed up.
posted by credulous at 10:37 AM on September 9 [3 favorites]

For comparison, the sc140 project.
(previously on MeFi, but with now-broken link)
posted by doubtfulpalace at 11:47 AM on September 9

Huh, looks like Dan Stowell was one of the originators of sc140; I know him from work on bioacoustics. It's a small world of audio nerds, as it turns out.

It's interesting to compare Linus' work with sc140. In some sense, it's closer to the metal - writing machine code directly to play the music and run the visuals. (and in the case of 'a mind is born' doing it before the boot loop of the commodore!) OTOH, sc140 is dependent on the Supercollider engine, which is a much larger binary. BUT Linus' work is quite specific to the Commodore microcontroller and SID chip - so there's hardware ready to interpret the code, similar to the supercollider backend.
posted by kaibutsu at 2:33 PM on September 9

kaibutsu: One could, in theory, write most of the sc140 pieces directly in scsynth bytecode, although given the existence of SC's DSL, it would be a bit perverse. The first one compiles to 839 bytes, which is in the same range as the FFP... but mine (the third one) is 64k, so, yeah, no.
posted by doubtfulpalace at 6:50 PM on September 9 [2 favorites]

See also | ̅ ̅ ̅| ͟ ͟ ͟ | ̅ ̅| ͟ ͟ | ̅ ̅| ͟ ͟ | ̅| ͟ ͟| ̅| ͟ | ̅ ̅ ̅| ͟ ͟ ͟ | MetaFilter, a discussion of Blake "PROTODOME" Troise's city jazz album that fits on a 32 KB ATMega328 microcontroller. And sounds incredible, too.

It's a shame that this album can't be played back in emulation. VICE only allows two SID chips of the same type, and Linus relies on the quirks of the older and new chips for sound texture. If you want to try it anyway, theer's a howto at the CSDb entry.
posted by scruss at 1:28 PM on September 10

Damn these are good. I don't know if I've just not heard SID chips before but there's a mad amount of richness and smooth filter passing(?).
posted by lucidium at 4:05 AM on September 12