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Tristan Perich's 1-Bit Symphony — music from on/off pulses on a chip

egapmada · 2026-08-10T11:01:34.000Z · in Music
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100k ft — What is this?

Tristan Perich's 1-Bit Symphony — music from on/off pulses on a chip
artA-tier

50k ft — Why care?

1-Bit Symphony is a composition housed in a CD case: a microchip running assembly code that outputs 1-bit on/off pulses as sound. A 695-page companion book prints the processor's cycles for the first hundredth of a second.
artcreative codingmusic

10k ft — Key takeaways

• A strong reference for code-as-score work • Extreme constraints like a single bit of output can produce rich music

5k ft — Tools & techniques

(no tools tagged) 1-bit synthesis, assembly programming

1k ft — Deep-dive / try it

This is one of my favourite compositions: 1-BIT SYMPHONY by @tristanperich An accompanying book arrived in the post the other day and it is truly mind blowing. I love this stuff.
Transcript excerpt
Hello everybody, I would like to share with you something very cool and slightly nerdy. This is Tristan Perich's one-bit symphony This little thing is one of my most prized possessions. I love it according to the spiel It is a complete electronic circuit which utilizes on and off electrical pulses synthesized by assembly code to manifest data as sound Now I find this incredibly moving and I'll play you a little bit of it now. So here's our battery. There's the on and off switch Here's that tiny little microchip here. This little button goes to the next movement and this is our volume so usually you would plug it into a Set of headphones, but I've got it going whoop into our stereo and through our speakers. So Just open it up Okay Let's turn this sucker on. Yes. Oh, I love this. So While this is playing I just want to show you this I got this the other day. This is a book which Shows you the first one one hundredth of a second of one-bit symphony. So effectively this little processor here executes Nulls and computational cycles which are all Printed out in here. It's a 695 page book. It's just fantastic. It's fascinating. I Find this really beautiful and slightly Scary. Well, very scary actually the fact that this Is just one one hundredth of a second of A Tiny little chips brain So let's just try this again. Here we go this much Not even unbelievable So, yeah, love it love it love it love it another look

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Collection: Music