alt Hacker News> Plenty of music was developed in the form of source files.
That's fascinating. I came in during the Amiga era, and everything was SoundTracker etc. files. I had no idea that music was hand-coded like this.
> Plenty of music was developed in the form of source files.
That's fascinating. I came in during the Amiga era, and everything was SoundTracker etc. files. I had no idea that music was hand-coded like this.
Some of the sound drivers would be paired with a machine code monitor, and therefore you could interactively develop by modifying hex bytes, which when you think about it, is basically the prototype for a tracker workflow.
There was definitely a tendency to do "compose on the piano, then arrange" with a lot of the early chiptune workflows though. With Galway's stuff there is more reliance on proceduralism to get those long evolving sequences, something which is actually easier to access when it's built from source files and you can define rhythms, chords, dynamics, modulation as forms of indirection.