Artists like Markus really give credence to the Orson Welles quote: "The enemy of art is the absence of limitations." It's incredible the creative ways people work around limitations of their medium, creating something beyond and pushing the state of the art.
I love the way Brian Eno phrased not exactly this idea, but something tangential, which follows in full:
> “Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.”
So weird to see this on the front page of HackerNews this week. I was browsing The Mod Archive just a few days ago and enjoyed this exact mod and noted how familiar it sounded. I added it to my 'favourite tunes' Youtube playlist too. My cynical mind thinks maybe there's some connection between my search history and stories that appear on my HN frontpage. However, it's likely just a coincidence.
If there is a connection it is more likely that a series of marketing campaigns is promoting content like this in broader strokes that lead to your search history existing via subliminal influence.
I find myself really enjoying HN around this time of year when there's less traffic to the site and articles like this get a a much bigger chance to make it to the front page.
Space Debris is peak nostalgia for me. I've been transferring my little library of amiga mods from one computer to the next since 1991 and Space Debris is one of the best tracks of the format. I remember even trying to use Space Debris as the music theme for a roller coaster I was making using a toy called Spacewarp.
Back in the pre-internet day it was hard to find out more about the artists, as they were just aliases embedded in mods or at the end of demoscene releases. I always wondered who they were, and turns out they were most often teens from somewhere around Finland or Scandinavia, who went on to game companies as composers working on things like Eve Online.
One of the best MODs ever. Right up there with Enigma, Stardust Memories, Elysium, and others.
From a technical perspective, the level of musicality that some artists could derive within the limitations is truly crazy. 100k or so, 8-bit samples, four channels, and composed (basically) from a Norton Commander-style interface. Not to mention a majority of these songs were composed when the musicians were teenagers!
Would be happy to set up a playlist for those who would like an introduction to the scene!
I stayed within the Amiga scene, which means a lot of the picks are demo soundtracks that have that Italo/synthpop kind of style. But there's lots of classics in there, from Jester/Sanity (Germany) to Firefox & Mantronix/Phenomena (Sweden) to Dr. Awesome/Crusaders (Norway) and on. Captain, is of course, Finnish.
That just links to Space Debris, not whatever playlist you created. I was going to poke through and see if I could recommend any additions, but, well... here we are.
I would recommend bitjam podcast in general, but episode 20[0] is a great introduction to some hits of the scene from over the years. Highly recommended for the nostalgia hit, and just great tunes!
Onward by Jugi is easily my all time favourite mod (extended format with huge channel count!)
Oh man, that song brings back memories (and my own attempts to create music with the trackers in the 90's). Thanks for sharing your thought process and context around how you created that song!
I first heard Space Debris in an MS-DOS MOD player that didn't support the portamento command. I played the heck out of it (and a ton of other MODs) on that platform (even going so far as to make cassette tapes of MODs that I listened to on my portable cassette player). To this day, hearing it in a MOD player that properly handles portamento still sounds vaguely odd to me.
An amazing MOD and a really nice write up which brings back memories. I was mucking around with MODs at the same time but never managed to make anything sound as good as what is linked here. In my defense, I didn't have access to pro-level synth, a sampler, or any kind of musical talent.
It really was a time of endless experimentation, everyone had the same basic hardware so anyone who managed to push the limits was regarded with awe.
You can hear my one surviving MOD here[0] if you want to know what the average 16yo on the street could do with a stock Amiga and mediocre grades in school cert music. It really is on the other end of the spectrum from Space Debris in terms of quality.
Man does that brings back memories! Back in the 90s, french magazine PC Team offered a CDROM with game demos and tons of random goodies including mods. I listen to them with Cubic Player on MS-DOS which had some cool visual effects. I still have my favourite mods on my HDD, including SPACEDEB.MOD!
It's really saying something that within the first five seconds I knew exactly which MOD this was. It's one of those tunes that you absolutely had to listen to back in the day along with Stardust Memories, Comic Bakery, and a handful of others. It definitely deserves a remake... second only to Comic Bakery (which if you haven't seen the video of the boyband remix... go watch it).
I find, in my fourties’ how nostalgic I am for those moments of discoveries I made in my late teens. I found mods very early in both my college life and internet exposure (~’94). Space Debris was one that stuck with me the hardest (along with Unreal ][ by Purple Motion which is really an s3m, not a mod). I was pleasantly surprised to find Kaarlonen’s blog about his experience composing the track.
S3M is just a MODule in a different format, reflecting the hardware capabilities of the PC-bucket sound cards. It‘s a technical necessity since mechanically, the way this type of music is composed and played is tied to the hardware.
S3M could do a lot more than the old MOD format though. Mainly the support for more channels and instruments made a world of difference. It's the same basic principle, but creating a track was far less of a priority puzzle in Scream Tracker.
This music really traveled. I'm in the US, and instantly the song started playing in my head when I saw the title. This song, and others like it, downloaded from BBSes when I was like 10-12 years old, introduced me to a much vaster world of music than I had ever experienced in my rural US environment.
As someone who got into trackers after the "golden age", I wanted to comment with my perspective (focused on DSP, workflow, and chiptune):
I noticed the video in the page is a remaster. To my ears, it sounds like it's being played with non-Amiga interpolation with less spectral imaging/replication (often mistakenly called aliasing), altered panning (the Amiga has an infamously rigid hard-panning setup), and possibly eq/reverb mastering on top of that. Compared to a video with aliasing (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thnXzUFJnfQ, no clue if the Amiga low-pass filtering is accurate), I like how the remaster has less high-pitched whine, but I feel it's missing out on the spectral replicas which influence the original's sound.
> I could try “hiding” the loop point by adding fades in the beginning and end of the sample, and then overlapping the fade areas.
I've heard people saying that crossfading is effective at looping, but in my experience it's difficult to pick good crossfade regions which don't result in altered timbre or audible discontinuities. Good crossfades are still slightly visible in a spectrogram, and bad crossfades are visibly and audibly discontinuous.
I'm probably 30 years too late, but I implemented a more sophisticated (but more situational) algorithm which analyzes a sample as a spectrum, then resynthesizes it using a variation of the existing padsynth algorithm. This produces a perfectly looped sound with no discontinuities at the loop point (unlike crossfading), with built-in chorusing (not suitable for solo instruments), no attack phase (not suitable for staccatos or plucked/percussive instruments), unfortunately with a bit of metallic artifacting. A year ago I implemented a prototype at https://github.com/nyanpasu64/padsynth which could shorten choirs and create chorded samples, but I never fleshed it out into a user-friendly product.
Another idea I had was to resynthesize the "loop end" of a sample, altering the amplitudes and phases of the harmonics to line up with the neighborhood of the "loop begin" (I'm undecided on exactly how to tweak the pitch and amplitude, whether to use phasors on a plane without pitch shifting, or shift pitch, or what), or crossfade while preserving the amplitudes of each harmonic, etc. This would preserve the majority of the original sample, making it useful for soloed instruments (though more difficult to use for chording samples). Sadly I haven't actually implemented this.
> A common trick to emulate a rhythmic delay effect was to use a short staccato instrument, play a melody with it, then manually go through every empty row on the same channel, copy & paste the note from a few rows above with a reduced volume, and repeat this until all rows were used.
0CC-FamiTracker and forks partly automate this process using an echo buffer command, which acts like a note with the same pitch as 1-4 notes above.
I believe trackers need more innovation, better commands (duration-target pitch/volume slides, graphical editing), better ways of managing state (eg. effects ringing on for longer than you want, or the wrong effects being active when a song loops), and better support for non-grid-aligned notes. I don't have all the answers yet, sadly. I've been working on https://gitlab.com/exotracker/exotracker-cpp but it's stuck in development hell.
> A simple and restricted composing environment like a four channel tracker with a limited amount of samples guarantees you can’t spend half a day tuning a kick drum sound.
I think that partly separates sample-based trackers and General MIDI formats (primarily based arou...
If this is 30 years too late then so am I – Belated thanks. Your work is certainly appreciated.
Indeed I came to check if someone had mentioned this already – and if not, post exactly that video of the properly crunchy Amiga-sounding recording. I love the kind of “etched” sound of that time. Spectral treasure.
Earlier in the 21st century us kids were using Propellerheads’ Reason a bit. Then I felt increasingly dissatisfied with the sound. There seemed to be this particular sou d to Reason’s virtual instruments. Plasticky? Since then I’ve come across mentions of aliasing; I wonder if that’s… part of the reason? (heeeh :sweat_smile:)
- In "Compared to a video with aliasing", I meant "compared to a video with spectral replication".
- I'm surprised that this song's "synth female choir" sounds practically identical to the choir samples I've heard in SNES games. Though it makes sense, considering SNES music comes from the same era and had similar size restrictions, requiring cutting down samples and reusing them across wide pitch ranges.
And a question to the composer: When I downloaded the .mod, looped the sample 3 times in Audacity (joining the seams), and switched the track to spectrogram mode, I saw spectral discontinuities (more energy than expected in between harmonics, at multiple frequencies, both low and high) at ~19084 samples (the loop point) and ~14501 samples. Is this second discontinuity the point you began the crossfade?
(When I opened the .mod in OpenMPT, it said the loop point was at sample 2. I tried looping the sample from Sample 2 in Audacity, but this resulted in a far more prominent spectral discontinuity and an audible click upon looping. Oddly OpenMPT wouldn't let me set the loop start to any position below 58.)
Mods, and other like formats of the era, was just the coolest format in music ever. Not only could you play and enjoy the song (which is all you were limited to for all music to date), but you got all the individual samples that made the entirety of the song, the notation and could see/study the techniques used. Nothing else gave you that, and likely won't ever again. I never would have gotten into digital music creation and sound design without them.
...and the samples being included also made sure that mods sounded more or less the same no matter where you played them, whereas MIDI files (the alternative at the time) sounded wildly different depending on the capabilities of the sound card.
Sometimes you can, because the music was composed for a specific synthesizer. One notable example is the Roland MT-32, which was used for the soundtracks of many early PC games.
They don't include everything needed to recreate the song within the format. All of the plugins and fx dont transfer with the daw file - just the data used in them. You have to have them already installed in your system. They're also not distributed to the public, generally.
I made mods in the 90s too, some of them were pretty ok even. Sadly, I didn't manage to upload any of them before succumbing to random happenstances of data loss :/
Totally OT, but these old school stuff (I was part of the demoscene) just gives me a lot of nostalgia. It was so much fun, so much creativity, so much freedom.
How do you old guys cope with these memories ? Personally I miss that a lot, mostly the freedom aspect of it. How do you go with your life in a way that nostalgia is not that bad ?
77 comments
[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 133 ms ] thread> “Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.”
Back in the pre-internet day it was hard to find out more about the artists, as they were just aliases embedded in mods or at the end of demoscene releases. I always wondered who they were, and turns out they were most often teens from somewhere around Finland or Scandinavia, who went on to game companies as composers working on things like Eve Online.
From a technical perspective, the level of musicality that some artists could derive within the limitations is truly crazy. 100k or so, 8-bit samples, four channels, and composed (basically) from a Norton Commander-style interface. Not to mention a majority of these songs were composed when the musicians were teenagers!
Would be happy to set up a playlist for those who would like an introduction to the scene!
I stayed within the Amiga scene, which means a lot of the picks are demo soundtracks that have that Italo/synthpop kind of style. But there's lots of classics in there, from Jester/Sanity (Germany) to Firefox & Mantronix/Phenomena (Sweden) to Dr. Awesome/Crusaders (Norway) and on. Captain, is of course, Finnish.
Let the Eurovision-ish arguments commence ;)
I guess I can't edit above -- try this instead: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbuV2RJYsZvnVw5-MX-Xy...
Onward by Jugi is easily my all time favourite mod (extended format with huge channel count!)
[0] http://www.bitfellas.org/page.php?154
It really was a time of endless experimentation, everyone had the same basic hardware so anyone who managed to push the limits was regarded with awe.
You can hear my one surviving MOD here[0] if you want to know what the average 16yo on the street could do with a stock Amiga and mediocre grades in school cert music. It really is on the other end of the spectrum from Space Debris in terms of quality.
[0] https://sheep.horse/2011/11/stuff_from_my_old_hard_drive.htm...
I noticed the video in the page is a remaster. To my ears, it sounds like it's being played with non-Amiga interpolation with less spectral imaging/replication (often mistakenly called aliasing), altered panning (the Amiga has an infamously rigid hard-panning setup), and possibly eq/reverb mastering on top of that. Compared to a video with aliasing (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thnXzUFJnfQ, no clue if the Amiga low-pass filtering is accurate), I like how the remaster has less high-pitched whine, but I feel it's missing out on the spectral replicas which influence the original's sound.
> I could try “hiding” the loop point by adding fades in the beginning and end of the sample, and then overlapping the fade areas.
I've heard people saying that crossfading is effective at looping, but in my experience it's difficult to pick good crossfade regions which don't result in altered timbre or audible discontinuities. Good crossfades are still slightly visible in a spectrogram, and bad crossfades are visibly and audibly discontinuous.
I'm probably 30 years too late, but I implemented a more sophisticated (but more situational) algorithm which analyzes a sample as a spectrum, then resynthesizes it using a variation of the existing padsynth algorithm. This produces a perfectly looped sound with no discontinuities at the loop point (unlike crossfading), with built-in chorusing (not suitable for solo instruments), no attack phase (not suitable for staccatos or plucked/percussive instruments), unfortunately with a bit of metallic artifacting. A year ago I implemented a prototype at https://github.com/nyanpasu64/padsynth which could shorten choirs and create chorded samples, but I never fleshed it out into a user-friendly product.
Another idea I had was to resynthesize the "loop end" of a sample, altering the amplitudes and phases of the harmonics to line up with the neighborhood of the "loop begin" (I'm undecided on exactly how to tweak the pitch and amplitude, whether to use phasors on a plane without pitch shifting, or shift pitch, or what), or crossfade while preserving the amplitudes of each harmonic, etc. This would preserve the majority of the original sample, making it useful for soloed instruments (though more difficult to use for chording samples). Sadly I haven't actually implemented this.
> A common trick to emulate a rhythmic delay effect was to use a short staccato instrument, play a melody with it, then manually go through every empty row on the same channel, copy & paste the note from a few rows above with a reduced volume, and repeat this until all rows were used.
0CC-FamiTracker and forks partly automate this process using an echo buffer command, which acts like a note with the same pitch as 1-4 notes above.
I believe trackers need more innovation, better commands (duration-target pitch/volume slides, graphical editing), better ways of managing state (eg. effects ringing on for longer than you want, or the wrong effects being active when a song loops), and better support for non-grid-aligned notes. I don't have all the answers yet, sadly. I've been working on https://gitlab.com/exotracker/exotracker-cpp but it's stuck in development hell.
> A simple and restricted composing environment like a four channel tracker with a limited amount of samples guarantees you can’t spend half a day tuning a kick drum sound.
I think that partly separates sample-based trackers and General MIDI formats (primarily based arou...
https://www.fileformat.info/info/emoji/crown/index.htm
If this is 30 years too late then so am I – Belated thanks. Your work is certainly appreciated.
Indeed I came to check if someone had mentioned this already – and if not, post exactly that video of the properly crunchy Amiga-sounding recording. I love the kind of “etched” sound of that time. Spectral treasure.
Earlier in the 21st century us kids were using Propellerheads’ Reason a bit. Then I felt increasingly dissatisfied with the sound. There seemed to be this particular sou d to Reason’s virtual instruments. Plasticky? Since then I’ve come across mentions of aliasing; I wonder if that’s… part of the reason? (heeeh :sweat_smile:)
- In "Compared to a video with aliasing", I meant "compared to a video with spectral replication".
- I'm surprised that this song's "synth female choir" sounds practically identical to the choir samples I've heard in SNES games. Though it makes sense, considering SNES music comes from the same era and had similar size restrictions, requiring cutting down samples and reusing them across wide pitch ranges.
And a question to the composer: When I downloaded the .mod, looped the sample 3 times in Audacity (joining the seams), and switched the track to spectrogram mode, I saw spectral discontinuities (more energy than expected in between harmonics, at multiple frequencies, both low and high) at ~19084 samples (the loop point) and ~14501 samples. Is this second discontinuity the point you began the crossfade?
(When I opened the .mod in OpenMPT, it said the loop point was at sample 2. I tried looping the sample from Sample 2 in Audacity, but this resulted in a far more prominent spectral discontinuity and an audible click upon looping. Oddly OpenMPT wouldn't let me set the loop start to any position below 58.)
Always wondered if you could ever know with Midi what the original music creators ever intended since it varied wildly based on hardware.
Historic retrospective:
Ahoy - "Trackers: The Sound of 16-Bit" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roBkg-iPrbw
How about DAW project files?
It wouldn't be the first time. I think quite a few of my favorite video game tracks from that era were similarly pilfered from the Amiga MOD scene.
How do you old guys cope with these memories ? Personally I miss that a lot, mostly the freedom aspect of it. How do you go with your life in a way that nostalgia is not that bad ?