Music

I decided to take a long break from coding the game mechanics and instead have a closer look at generating some music, or "mooozik", as they say round these parts.

Because my living involves a certain amount of programming I don't need much in the way of persuasion to run as far away from coding as I can. On the other hand, playing around with music is much more appealing to me and I've been having a lot of fun over the last few weeks getting the Dragon to produce some audio that is - dare I say it? - musical.

The fruit of someone else's labour

I would like to have as much music in the game as possible: Theme music on the title screen, story music, get ready music, game over music, high score music etc. Whatever I can fit in to fill the silence. Maybe even in-game music if a sound chip is present. I'm going to aim high and see how far I get.

The biggest problem seemed to be the lack of a suitable music engine. When I started work on the game I wasn't aware of anything off the shelf that I could use and it looked like I was going to have to write something from scratch.

I learned quite a bit about music playback while working on a musical tape loader with Simon Jonassen and started to get a feel for the kind of things that might be possible. Then, as luck would have it, Ciaran Anscomb brought his marvellous CyD project to my attention.

To fill in a bit of background this is a software synth based on the CoCoSID project by Rémi Veilleux, which as the title suggests, is designed to play C64 SID tunes on the CoCo. It works by mixing three channels of synthesised waveforms and updating the synthesis parameters 50 times per second. The waveforms are synthesised from a selection of reference waveforms stored in memory. The playback parameters are determined by an offline conversion of a SID register dump obtained from a C64 music player into a pattern-based format that CoCoSID can read in real time. The results are really impressive.

What Ciaran has done with CyD is to produce a rewritten, optimised version with a new music processor allowing you to enter music data in a more memory-efficient programmatic form. It has a variety of features such as envelopes, portamento, subroutine calls, transposition and arpeggios - i.e. he's made it more like a music driver that back-in-the-day purveyors of fine tunery such as Martin Galway or Rob Hubbard might have used. "That looks handy," I remember thinking to myself, "I'm having that."

Some of you may have heard the title music from the 32K demo version of the game. This is being played using an unmodified version of CyD. It has a very distinctive and dynamic sound, far removed from the sounds that most of us Dragon owners are used to hearing. However, after the novelty wore off, I wondered if I could bend things a bit to add even more complexity to the sound.

Pushing the envelope

Generating a tone in software will very often be based around a phase accumulator implemented with something like the following piece of code:

phase equ  *+1
      ldd  #0
freq  equ  *+1
      addd #0
      std  <phase

That generates a sawtooth waveform in the A register. Self-modifying code is used for performance, and direct page addressing helps too. Synthesising an arbitrary waveform is just an indexed instruction away:

      lda a,y  ; y points to a 256 byte waveform

The same lookup could be done by self-modifying the lower address byte of an extended address instruction with the upper byte pointing to the current waveform. In fact CyD does a bit of both to mix three channels together in an optimal way.

Envelopes are simulated by using separate versions of the same waveform differing only in volume level. Having just two or three volume levels works surprisingly well.

So what can we do that's different? Funnily enough, Ciaran came up with something new for his Dunjunz game, this time generating square waves directly. Instead of looking up a reference waveform stored in memory it converts the sawtooth in the A register into a square wave using something like this:

    lsla       ; put msb of A into B
    rorb       ;
    sex        ; extend sign of B into A
    anda #vol  ; set volume

If A is greater than or equal to 128, it becomes set to #vol, else it gets set to zero. Nice. It's the sort of branchless conditional construct that you might see a compiler generate to avoid stalling a pipelined cpu and here it is making itself useful on the 6809.

That got me thinking about how cool it would be to be able to vary the duty cycle of the square wave i.e. generate rectangular pulses of varying width. That would make for some very interesting noises. It turns out that duty can be added for free by replacing the lsla instruction with an adda:

    adda #duty ; use duty to generate carry
    rorb       ; ...and set sign of B
    sex        ; extend sign of B into A
    anda #vol  ; set volume

Varying the duty value from 0 to 255 will generate rectangular waveforms with corresponding duty ratio of 0 to nearly 100%. A duty value of 128 will generate a square wave as before.

To try it out I added a command to CyD to set the duty. To demonstrate what it sounds like, first here's a simple bass riff played using a square wave:



And now the same notes but with different duty cycles:



Things get more interesting when the duty is varied while a note is playing so I added a tiny bit of code to do just that:



Let's go mad and play two voices an octave apart with different duty settings:



Now you're talking. If you enjoy upsetting C64 fans, try calling this sound 'SID sound'. That riles them up something chronic.

Kicks like a concrete donkey

CyD gives us three channels to play with, which immediately makes me think of great power trios such as Clapton/Bruce/Baker, Lifeson/Lee/Peart and, err, Rod/Jane/Freddy. I'm thinking one channel for lead, another for bass and another for drums.

Drums can be synthesised from combinations of noise, square, triangle waveforms etc., and messing with the frequency. In fact I did this for the title music in the 32K demo, but the kick drum, while adding cool accents to the bass, did sound a bit feeble to me.

A kick drum is pretty much a noisy click followed immediately by a thud. The frequency is fairly low and drops with time with the volume swelling in the middle. The whole thing might last 50 - 300ms. Bearing this in mind I drew a 256 sample waveform freehand in Milky Tracker:

Crude, but effective

I boosted the volume somewhat, resulting in a bit of clipping, which is helpful here and makes the kick louder. This was then exported to an 8 bit wav file and converted using sox into a 256 byte raw binary file that could be included into the assembly source. To save you the pain of trying to decipher the sox manual, this is the command I used:

    sox -D in.wav out.raw vol 0.33 dcshift -0.66

The -D option disables dithering. When dithering is enabled, it can make the waveform one bit too loud, potentially resulting in overflows and nasty clicking during playback.

There are still some hoops to jump through to get CyD to play the sample properly. First we need to reset the channel phase counter to the beginning of the waveform when we trigger the sample, otherwise it will play from some random point. This required a new sample playback command. We next need to make an envelope that is about as long as the sample, in this case 4/50ths of a second, and ending with a silent waveform to stop playback. Then the frequency needs to be fine tuned so that the sample ends when the envelope ends. Otherwise the sample will either be cut short, or it will start again from the beginning. I manually adjusted the first note in the frequency table to suit the sample, though I think a frequency set command will be required to allow a variety of samples to be played.

This sounds like the sort of fiddly exercise that should be automated in software, so that's yet another thing to add to the ever-growing todo list. Anyway, this is what a 256 byte kick drum sample sounds like on a Dragon:

Music puns are not my forte

To actually compose music I play around with ideas in Milky Tracker and then hand convert to CyD. (Yeah, yeah, I know I should write a conversion script.) I've also been playing with MikroWave on my phone. It's a bit of a toy but you can throw together new loops and rhythms really quickly.

Time for a quick demo tune. Now it's fair to warn you that I quite like droning repetitive music. This allows me to listen to Moby without having to gnaw off my own arm to escape, though the urge is never far away. Like all the other recordings on this page this was captured from xroar. Roll credits...