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This was my entry for the Oldschool Executable Music compo at Breakpoint 2006, which placed 6th out of 12 entries. This was a cross-platform competition to produce a piece of music on any sub-32-bit computer (the Spectrum in this case) in under 32K.

Download MP3 (4.5M)
Download TAP (10K)

As the saying goes, never work with children, animals or 1980s-era speech synthesisers.

It is a well established fact that to win a music compo at a large party, you need a gimmick, and speech is as good a gimmick as any. This led me to start experimenting with a Cheetah Sweet Talker interface I picked up on eBay – a worthy project, I thought, as to the best of my knowledge nobody has ever done anything creative with speech synthesis on the Spectrum beyond using it to robotically swear at friends and family. My master plan was to write a jazz piece with semi-spoken lyrics (because the synthesiser can only “sing” in monotone) about marmosets. Yes, marmosets. It was meant to be in keeping with the party theme of “Rumble In The Jungle”, you see.
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Out of all the demos I’ve written, there aren’t many that I’ve been totally happy with at the time of release, but Haiku is one.

It was my first attempt at a 4K intro, written for tUM*05 which was to my knowledge the first ever party to hold an intro compo open to multiple 8-bit platforms – although in the end it went uncontested in that category, and instead went into the demo competition, where it got first place.

• Download Haiku (TAP)
• Haiku on Demotopia
• Haiku on Pouet
• Haiku on YouTube
• Haiku source, including bezedit design tool (20K)

There’s a mammoth article in issue 3 of ZX Shed covering the design work and coding tricks that went into its production. Here’s a (multimedia-enhanced) taster…

It’s harder than you’d think to write tinkly oriental music. My first few attempts on my trusty electric keyboard (set to Koto or Shamisen mode) sounded fairly authentic, but stripped back to the square waves of the AY sound chip, they quickly turned into bubblegum dance music.

Floundering in writer’s block, I put on a DVD of Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbour Totoro, a film so cutesy it makes Bubble Bobble look like The Exorcist. Lo and behold, after King Totoro had led the dance to make Mei and Satsuki’s acorns grow, a melody leapt out, unmistakeably eastern and yet instantly appealing to western tastes.

I analysed it every which way, pulled apart the plodding rhythm and the musical scale, and put together a melody of my own following the same style.