The same jump, six ways

Six machines, one idea

1977, the beeper. Many early home computers had a speaker wired to a single switch. The program clicked it on and off, and the speed of the clicking was the pitch. There was no volume, only on and off, and the processor had to do the clicking itself, so it could do little else while a sound played. The slider sets how many times a second the pitch can change.

1983, the sound chip. A dedicated chip now made the tones, so the program only had to send it new numbers, usually once for every frame of the picture, sixty times a second. A typical chip had three or four voices of square or pulse waves and a noise voice for crashes, each with sixteen fixed steps of volume. The pitch came from dividing the chip’s clock by a whole number, so most notes were a hair out of tune. The sliders set the number of volume steps and the pulse width; thinner pulses sound more nasal.

1990, FM synthesis. One sine wave bends the pitch of another so fast that you hear a new, richer tone instead of a wobble. If the bending, called modulation, fades quickly, the sound starts bright and turns soft, like a struck bell. These chips had no noise voice, so hits and crashes were made by pushing the modulation hard at an odd ratio until the tone turned metallic. Brightness sets how deep the modulation goes; the ratio sets how the two waves relate.

1995, sample playback. With more memory and CD-ROMs, games could play back recorded sound. Space was still precious, so short sounds were often stored at eleven or twenty-two thousand slices a second rather than forty-four thousand, and sometimes in 8 bits. A low rate loses the high frequencies and adds a fizzy edge; fewer bits add hiss. Our “recording” is synthesised first and then squeezed the same way.

The 2000s, compressed and in stereo. Games streamed much of their sound from compressed files, the same family of formats as music files, and mixed it in stereo or surround with artificial rooms. Low bitrates trim the very top of the sound, which can make it a little dull. The sliders set the stereo width, from mono to wide, and the bitrate. Headphones make the width easy to hear.

The 2010s, layered design. A modern sound designer builds an effect from parts: a click for the instant of impact, a tonal body, a low thump you feel more than hear, and a little air on top. The game then nudges the pitch and the volume on every play, so a sound heard a thousand times never quite repeats. The sliders set how many layers play and how much each play varies.

What changed, and what did not

Across forty years the jump got wider, richer, more varied and far more work to make. The idea underneath stayed the same: a quick rise in pitch that says up, and an ending short enough for the next sound to follow. Designers still start where the beeper did, with a pitch curve and a length, and then dress it in the tools of their time.