EP Composes A New Chiptune Each Time

[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.

19 thoughts on “EP Composes A New Chiptune Each Time

  1. 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.

      1. 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…

          1. 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 :/

Leave a Reply to chaosbcCancel reply

Please be kind and respectful to help make the comments section excellent. (Comment Policy)

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.