[Captain Credible] is a chiptune music artist. He wanted to release an EP, but a regular old em-pee-three was too lame for him, so he made a tiny board with a coin cell, an ATtiny85, and a 3.5mm socket on it.
Rather than just writing some code to generate the tones for a pre-composed song, his “Dead Cats” EP generates the music itself. Using the arduino-tiny library, which adds the tone() function to the ATtiny, he has the chip pick its own time signature, key, subdivisions, and tempo. The melody and drum beat is randomly generated into an array. In addition to that, there are some code “one-liners” which insert unique sounds. After that the code just loops through the music.
If you don’t like the song, simply unplug the audio cable and plug it back in. The 3.5mm jack he chose has a built-in micro-switch, so the board is only powered up if someone is listening. If you’d like to see the circuit diagram, purchase the EP, or take a look at the code, all of that is available on his site.
Man some crazy stuff going on with the stereo there. Between the lack of envelope and extreme stereo depth the video is literally painful to listen through through headphones.
Not only through through headphones. I would say it’s painful to listen in general.
What do you expect from something that is calles dead cats and plays music?
Why does most chiptune stuff sound like your 8 bit computer has crashed and is blasting out random junk from memory? This may be looking back with rose tinted nostalgia goggles but I’m sure game music actually was listenable back then and didn’t just give you a headache…
This is the sort of chiptune stuff I’m familiar with: https://soundcloud.com/treyfrey/drift
Are you sure you’re listening to chiptunes and not drone/noise/power-electronics? Merzbow can be beepy, bloopy, and pretty hard to listen to, but his music ain’t chiptunes by a long shot.
Woo, Trey Frey!
His chiptunes are amazing. I haven’t seen anyone else have a similar kind of sound. They aren’t super beepy or bloopy, *and* they’re made on Gameboys.
Does anyone know of any other chiptuner making similar music? I can’t find any :/
Okay, if you only need to play sound, it does the job.
I was allready writing a new sound lib for the Tinys, because the arduino implementation use delays and block the whole processor. Also it’s nicer to write a song in an array, without repeating to call a function.
https://sebastianfoerster86.wordpress.com/2016/03/20/musikalischer-attiny/ [german]
Check the github link…
I’ve been working on a very similar design for almost two years. I hate it when that happens.
I’ve done the same with ATtiny45 but didn’t try to sell it…
Lol for the crazy and curvy gerber design:-)
No ground planes? Come on…
This kind of music needs a low signal to noise ration ;)
Sh*t ! It is already sold out ! I guess I need to wait for a reissue or to lurk on discogs ? :-)
sorry for my bad english
The edited profanity or the grammar? Both were perfectly fine ;)
Was not sure about the “lurk” verb…but if you got the meaning, I guess it is all right :-)
Needs an I2C pin to run a screen so you can replicate the seizures that the video in the teaser causes.
Côme on…we all know nothing can stop you Rasputin :-)
Hi, i try the code with arduino but i dont understand how switch without jack 3.5 mm. Thanks for share