Audio Developer Conference

Bytebeat is a music synthesis technique which principle of operation is based on that an audio stream of normally 8-bit PCM samples is generated using a function of a sample index. The function corresponds to a program that employs bitwise (and, or, xor, not) and basic arithmetic operators (add, multiply, subtract, divide, modulo and bit-shifts). The method was discovered by Ville-Matias Heikkilä in 2011. Bytebeat is also sometimes regarded as a new genre of music.

In its purest form bytebeat doesn't use any scores, instruments, oscillators or samples, yet the generated songs show the presence of melody and rhythm which is often complex and polyrhythmic. It could be mysterious how one-line C programs produce such results. In the talk, it will be shown how musical and self-similarity properties of generated waveforms follow from the math properties of bitwise and arithmetic operations.

The further development of bytebeat technique for using it as a control source for various synthesizer parameters like pitch, amplitude, modulation, etc. will be presented. It’ll also be shown that simple formulas could be applied for generating sequences of MIDI notes that could feed any generic synthesizer or sampler.