PC Speaker To Eleven
habr.com
habr.com
Explanation here: https://www.reenigne.org/blog/8088-pc-speaker-mod-player-how...
386 can do it with no tricks. And you even have some spare horsepower to dither for improved quality.
I think this decision back then still ripples through the machines today and sound never truly feels like an integral part of the machine on Windows (Realtek audio driver) and you'll never have the feeling of a built in boot sound on your machine which felt so good on Macs till it was disabled recently.
It's not like computers didn't have good sound back then either compare the Lotus III example [0] from the article with the same on the Amiga hardware from around the same time [1]
Ever since I got my first iBook in college I've had mainly negative associations with that sound. Too frequently you'd open the thing in the middle of a lecture with 100+ people in the room and the sound starts blasting. The only solution I found was plugging in headphones so that the sound would go there instead.
I now have a 13" TouchBar MacBook Pro and it makes a sound when I plug the charger in no matter what I do to the volume settings. When I have it muted and open I can actually see it unmute the sound so that it can make the charger sound then mute it again when it's done.
defaults write com.apple.PowerChime ChimeOnAllHardware -bool false;killall PowerChime[0] https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/282752/turning-pow...
1. Mister Beep, from Poland. http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Mister_Beep/
2. Tristan Perich, from NYC. https://www.1bitsymphony.com/
3. Noah Vawter, 1-bit Groovebox: https://web.archive.org/web/20090212172253/http://web.media....
The commentary that still resonates with me even now, is 'He can't be happy with that one!' and the crowd 'ooohs' and 'ahhhs'
I believe the max I could record was about 7 seconds before I ran out of memory. But it worked and I was happy and proud. :)
I remember being amazed how i'd spent so many hours coding something that executed in such a short amount of time.
A person in the room spoke up when I played it- "that's not A440, it's off slightly. Oh, and I have perfect pitch- it's about 439".
I had a small bug in my timing routine that made the pitch slightly lower, which I fixed.
I don't think that's really super-important. For example, when he heard that perfect pitch was frequently found in children of musicians, his conclusion is that it was inherited genetically. I think, instead, children of musicians are exposed to pitches and their labels (notes) very early, during neural plasticity, and develop the mental associations, probably with some assist from genetics.
The biophysics of audition are pretty interesting; see http://dailynexus.com/2017-08-24/hearing-a-biophysical-and-n...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hair_cell
One could imagine any number of genetic changes that could affect the ability of the physical system (these parts) as well as the neural parts to do this, but personally I think this is much more learned behavior, not genetically dominated.
Sure the labels are learned. But the ability to hear all that is spread out over a bell-curve. The whole class could tell 1 note, 1/3 could tell 2, then 2 kids could tell 3, then just 1.
It was something he could do, from a very young age. Not apparently learned. Not learned by most of his cohort at music school, so I'm guessing most likely something born with.
If there is a distribution, then we have to task to explain that. Reasonable to call it genetic? Why not?
Personally, I'd start with the strong observations like "People whose first language is tonal are more likely to have perfect pitch", while people whose ancestors spoke tonal languages, but were raised with a first language that isn't tonal, are less likely (and vice versa). That says to me "environmental differences" are as strong as genetic.
All of this is covered in extensive (and relatively accurate) detail on the wikipedia page. if you want to argue with me further, I suggest getting a PhD in the field, or at least extensive experience with molecular biology, genetics, biophysics, experimental design, and scientific philosophy, as all those are necessary prerequisites for discussing complex traits that have both genetic and environmental components.
Not just the learning - as suggested, maybe that's teachable (but probably not, look at all the advanced music students that never learn). But the speed and facility are not teachable - that came with the person.
Which is about the same as said above I guess.
And Really? Appeal to authority?
As for appeal to authority: completely appropriate in this case since it's a highly technical issue with a ton of prior knowledge that is both subtle and non-obvious. I don't really understand the idea that appeal to authority in this context is fallacious- as we are not having a formal logic argument, but arguing about extremely complex, messy, wet systems with complex feedback loops that lead to high non-intuitive behavior.
The idea that there is an 'absolute' involved indicates a reference of sorts, that is what makes it absolute. Labelling notes will distribute them along a bell curve and the dead center of that bell curve may or may not be the exact note. People with absolute pitch are able to do this exactly and that is what makes it interesting, that implies a reference to some standard, presumably one that they have internally. A tuning fork is such a standard, as are other mechanical oscillators with a high degree of repeatability.
It's not exactly; most people with AP can do, at best, note labelling. A much smaller group can identify pitches (frequencies) but then only with 1hz resolution around 440.
I don't mean to imply in these discussions that I'm an expert on absolute pitch- but I have a PhD in biophysics and we covered signal transduction in our classes.
I think sitting around speculating that there's some absolute pitch reference in people's head that works better because of genetic mutations is probably not the right path to go down. Because (almost) everybody has those pitch references (hair cells) and they're almost all equally functional (some mutations probably lead to slightly better or worse response).
I don't really follow all the parts about the bell curve other than to say most physical phenomena like this exhibit distributions that resemble gaussians, but that isn't really an indicator of the mechanism.
Was amazed when I heard it for the first time.
> PC Speaker can be turned in a DAC either by disabling timer count then enabling/disabling sound output, which makes it a very basic 1-bit DAC, or by using sound channel of the PIT to generate short pulses of variable width (PWM) at carrier frequency set by the timer interrupt, which effectively gives a much better 6-bit DAC.
So that makes me wonder what could be done with what we have now if we only had the vision and belief that it was possible? What will someone demo if 50 years on an “ancient” Windows 10 PC or iPad?
Still, what if we have Star Trek-like transporter building blocks today but just can’t see it yet?