playstation startup screen: what synth?

[colmon]

anyone know what synth was used to create the playstation startup sound? it's etched into my mind for eternity



man that brings back some memories *sniff*

[cartesia]

reminds me of waldorf wavetable synthesis

[RD9]

Def sounds digital. I wonder how hard it would be to recreate that with a VA. Or even analog. You can hear the filter/s pretty well and the delay effect. But I wonder how they originally did the chimes.

Is there higher quality audio of it somewhere?

[colmon]

interestingly, somebody recreated the boot sound with a juno 60 and cz-3000. i think they did a pretty good job -- except it misses the bells and harmonic drone at the end ie. the best the part!




for some reason none of the people who uploaded the original ps1 boot screen and music seem to have any concept of audio clipping in recording. they're all loud as h**l and sound like c**p. there must be an hq rip floating about somewhere

[noisecomm]

E-mu Morpheus?

[colmon]

that thread about wavestation filter resonance has got me wondering

but i guess this is gonna be one of those unsolved mysteries until some random dude gets interviewed 10 years later about how he got paid thousands of dollars to hold down a couple of keys on an emu morpheus or something a la the dude who created the mac startup sound

[Joey]

my bet is its the internal synth in the playstation?

[colmon]

there isn't one, is there? i thought the game soundtrack for ps1 resided on the cd-rom itself, as opposed to a midi player such as the snes and genesis used

i figured the boot sound must reside as a sample somewhere on the os rom?

[cartesia]

Yeah the super nintendo era was the last lot of consoles to have audio synthesis engines (besides handhelds)

Playstation and N64 were the first gen where traditional game music gave way to real music recordings (although quite alot of it was made with shitty general midi sounds/insstruments)

[Joey]

But the n64 DID have an internal synth.

[cartesia]

But the n64 DID have an internal synth.

really? I know it had a separate processor which handled audio & vector video but I was under the impression it just handled playback rather than synthesis..

N64 wiki:

"The RSP also frequently performs audio functions (although the CPU can be tasked with this as well). It can play back most types of audio (dependent on software codecs) including uncompressed PCM, MP3, MIDI, and tracker music. The RSP is capable of a maximum of 100 channels of PCM at a time, but this is with 100% system utilization for audio. It has a maximum sampling rate of 48 kHz with 16-bit audio; however, storage limitations caused by the cartridge format limited audio size (and thus quality).[27]"


*edit* Found some mentions on a forum of N64 using wavetable synthesis... but I'm not sure if that just means you can load a wavetable onto a cartridge and just read from it like any other PCM sample, or if it actually does internal synthesis.

[portland]

But the n64 DID have an internal synth.

really? I know it had a separate processor which handled audio & vector video but I was under the impression it just handled playback rather than synthesis..

N64 wiki:

"The RSP also frequently performs audio functions (although the CPU can be tasked with this as well). It can play back most types of audio (dependent on software codecs) including uncompressed PCM, MP3, MIDI, and tracker music. The RSP is capable of a maximum of 100 channels of PCM at a time, but this is with 100% system utilization for audio. It has a maximum sampling rate of 48 kHz with 16-bit audio; however, storage limitations caused by the cartridge format limited audio size (and thus quality).[27]"


*edit* Found some mentions on a forum of N64 using wavetable synthesis... but I'm not sure if that just means you can load a wavetable onto a cartridge and just read from it like any other PCM sample, or if it actually does internal synthesis.

I'm pretty sure the N64 and SNES had a system where the composer/sound designer would put in their own PCM waves (or maybe just copy General MIDI ones, as it seems to be in many N64 games) and their song data (MIDI files?) and then the system would play it back live, so it would save a lot of memory instead of playing back full audio files of songs. So I don't think there was any "synthesis" going on, I think it was more like a .MOD file / tracker kind of setup with samples and sequences. The Genesis of course had some kind of Yamaha FM chip (and a very limited lofi sample playback too).

[mao]

The PS1 has an internal synth engine for sure. A lot of game music is played by the synth itself with some samples loaded here and there. So It's not so strange if the boot jingle is done all with internal sounds.

[colmon]

actually most of the games had "real" soundtracks that were stored on the cd-roms; see gran turismo or tony hawks for instance. this is part of the reason video game music has so declined since the days of the snes and nes, instead of developers having to work within limitations and getting the best results out of tiny chips, increasing memory size means you can just license some weak metal band or whatever for the game soundtrack

only a handful of games on ps1 had interesting original soundtracks, ffvii and resident evil 2 being probably the best examples

[cartesia]

The PS1 has an internal synth engine for sure. A lot of game music is played by the synth itself with some samples loaded here and there. So It's not so strange if the boot jingle is done all with internal sounds.

The sound processing unit in the PS1 is only capable of sample playback... music for playstation games is generally stored in a PSF file which is basically samples + pattern information (some games use single recorded music tracks streamed from disc.. eg all the 'extreme sports' type games that feature actual rock/punk/etc)