mmmt-tools / Synthesis / bytebeat
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Bytebeat

Music from one line of arithmetic. A counter t ticks up; you run it through a short expression of bit-shifts and boolean ops — t*(t>>8|t>>9)&46&t>>8 — keep the low 8 bits as the sample, and out comes melody, rhythm, even structure, from nothing but integer math. No oscillators, no notes, no state. Discovered by Viznut in 2011 and still uncanny. Edit the formula and it updates live; a malformed one just goes quiet. "Float" mode returns a number in ±1 and can use sin/cos.

waveform
spectrum

Clock

8000 Hz

8000 Hz is the traditional bytebeat clock. Playing a note transposes it — the keyboard just scales the tick rate.

press play, edit the formula, and play notes (a s d f …) to transpose the clock