OTHER VINTAGE SOUND TECHNOLOGIES

An oscillator is an electronic component that produces a waveform that varies in frequency according to the input voltage. That’s a simplification of how it works, but early, coin-operated arcade games such as Space Invaders had an individual circuit for each sound they could produce.

The SID chip in the Commodore 64 combines three oscillators on to a single chip along with filters and other soundshaping components. The end result is a gritty sound that recalls the earliest synthesiser music. It’s one of the most highly regarded sound styles of the classic era; the SID is incapable of reproducing realistic sounds, however, unlike the later, sample-based, Amiga sound chip.

Back in the 1950s, scientists discovered that if you use one oscillator as the input of a second oscillator, you can produce complex, often metallic sounds. Yamaha termed this soundgeneration technique frequency modulation (FM) and produced a series of chips that were used in all manner of home systems and arcade machines. It was a Yamaha FM chip that gave the Sega Mega Drive its ability to produce twangy basslines and searing lead guitars alongside punchy percussion.

On the PC front, the AdLib soundcard was the first to offer an FM sound chip. As this standard (later supported by the Creative Labs Sound Blaster series) isn’t sample-based, the instruments produced using FM are never truly realistic, but the OPL2 Yamaha sound chip offered up to nine channels at once and lent itself well to complex musical arrangements that suited PC games.