Anyone good at sound design with GIST?

[Kirkman]

I'd love to find a way to produce a GIST-compatible version of planetside wind howl sound effect often heard in Star Trek. There's an example here:

https://www.trekcore.com/audio/backgrou ... anet_5.mp3

But designing sounds using GIST seems beyond my abilities. And honestly I'm not sure if GIST is capable of making a sound quite like this. But I figure if anyone would know (or could do it), it'd be some one on atari-forum!

(GIST = General Instruments Sound Tool from Synthetic Software in 1986)

[Eero Tamminen]

I've never heard of GIST, but I remember getting quite nice sounds from Linux SW synthetizer using mostly ring modulation. There's also a lot of old music devices using ring modulation, and some of them support MIDI. I would think that e.g. Theramin could produce some wind howls...

[Kirkman]

GIST was an early ST sound editor by Synthetic Software, sold in ANTIC Magazine's "The Catalog". Apparently ANTIC's Cybermate could play GIST sounds in synch with CAD-3D animation.

gist.png

The creators of GIST, Lee Actor and Gary Levenberg, wrote an in-depth article for START about electronic sounds, square waves, and the ST's sound generator chip: https://www.atarimagazines.com/startv1n3/HotSounds.html

Several authors apparently used GIST to produce effects for their games. It shows up in the credits/docs of Moonlord and "Companion I", for example.

It's available online today in several places, including Demozoo.

Anyway, the reason I'm interested in it specifically is because "Instant Graphics and Sound" supports playing sounds in GIST's .C format. If I can create the sounds I want (a _big_ "if"), I'd like to include them as part of a big IGS sequence I'm putting on my BBS.

[dje]

Interesting. Thanks for showing GIST.

Since I love music, I thought I'd give it a try. After playing with GIST a little, im not sure its capable of reproducing your desired sound.
You would need to create 3 GIST sounds and play them all at once. The problem I had was I couldn't make a sequence length which matches the startrek sounds.

I then turned to GFA to try to prototype the effect. I used 2 chanels with low freq droning sounds. I tried to get the two channels to "flange" a little by having their frequencies slightly off. I also tried running the freq's and volumes though sin tables. For the 3rd channel, I created random high pitch tones to give it a "space" feel. I found a space photo on the internet and converted it to a PI1 with a modified palette. The aim was to provide inspiration for sound creation.

So... I'm not happy with my results, but it may give you some ideas to play with. My "windhowl" source is: (I've also attached the project files)

Code: Select all

' *** NOTE: Set this to the location of the GFA file
' CHDIR "\WINDHOWL\"
DEFLIST 0
DEFWRD "A-Z"
CLS
SPOKE &H484,BCLR(PEEK(&H484),0)
OPEN "I",#1,"WINDHOWL.PI1"
SEEK #1,2
LET a$=INPUT$(32,#1)
~XBIOS(6,L:V:a$)
LET a$=INPUT$(32000,#1)
SPUT a$
CLR a$
CLOSE #1
REPEAT
  VSYNC
  VSYNC
  wind_howl
UNTIL LEN(INKEY$)
SOUND 0,0
'
PROCEDURE wind_howl
  INC tick
  LET a.freq=RAND(SIN(tick*0.2)*10+10)+50
  LET a.vol=SIN(tick*0.01)*5+3
  LET b.freq=SIN(tick*0.01)*400+3000
  LET b.vol=SIN(tick*0.06)*4+10
  LET c.freq=SIN(tick*0.02)*400+3000
  LET c.vol=SIN(tick*0.03)*SIN(tick*2)*4+10
  ~XBIOS(28,a.freq,128)
  ~XBIOS(28,SHR(a.freq,8),129)
  ~XBIOS(28,b.freq,130)
  ~XBIOS(28,SHR(b.freq,8),131)
  ~XBIOS(28,c.freq,132)
  ~XBIOS(28,SHR(c.freq,8),133)
  ~XBIOS(28,NOT 7,135)
  ~XBIOS(28,a.vol,136)
  ~XBIOS(28,b.vol,137)
  ~XBIOS(28,c.vol,138)
RETURN
END

2023-05-10-230718_1920x1080_scrot.png

On, a secondary note, I also coded a star field using a rotating palette. I was watching a YouTube video showing some rotating palette effects, and I though, maybe that would work with a star field.

2023-05-10-230738_1920x1080_scrot.png

Code: Select all

DEFLIST 0
DEFWRD "A-Z"
CLS
SPOKE &H484,PEEK(&H484) AND NOT 1
DIM palette(15)
palette(1)=&H7
palette(2)=&H700
palette(3)=&H770
palette(4)=&H777
FOR a=1 TO 50
  x%=SWAP(RAND(30)-15)
  y%=SWAP(RAND(30)-15)
  z%=SWAP(100)
  DO
    x=DIV(SHL(x%,8),z%)+160
    y=DIV(SHL(y%,8),z%)+100
    EXIT IF x<0 OR x>319 OR y<0 OR y>199
    PSET x,y,z AND 15
    INC z
    SUB z%,SWAP(2)
  LOOP WHILE z%>&H10000
NEXT a
REPEAT
  a=palette(15)
  INSERT palette(1)=a
  ~XBIOS(6,L:V:palette(0))
  VSYNC
  VSYNC
UNTIL LEN(INKEY$)

Hope that helps with your interstellar sound journey.

I guess you could try some samples and use a tracker. I'm still learning about this stuff myself.

Again, thanks for the GIST tips. I will try again with GIST, but it seem to be more suited to short sound effects.

[simonsunnyboy]

Why not encode all those single soundchip writes into a single XBIOS 32 playback string?

[dje]

Why not encode all those single soundchip writes into a single XBIOS 32 playback string?

I haven't coded XBIOS 32 stuff yet, but that looks like the way to go, assuming some suitable prototype audio could be created.

[simonsunnyboy]

I think you only need a list of register value pairs and an end terminator if you don't make use of the state machine for actual music.

[simonsunnyboy]

BTW the disk at demozoo for GIST contains replay routines for many languages, GFABASIC included.
From what I get from the manual it is a real sound driver in the interrupt and thus conversion to XBIOS 32 is probably problematic but doable.

One could capture the output to a .YM file and convert that.

[Kirkman]

dje, thanks so much for sharing your efforts. That inspires me to keep trying. I also love the palette cycling effect on the starfield. A few weeks ago I put together something similar using IGS. Here's a GIF (doesn't capture it fully, but it's close):

enterwarp.gif

Anyway, as far as the sound effects go, for my own efforts it's important to use GIST, since that's the format IGS supports, and my goal is playing animation and sound over a BBS telnet connection using IGS. I know IGS will allow two sounds to play over each other, and I presume three might be possible.

[DarkLord]

I'm impressed Josh. I just can't seem to come to grips with the editor.

Or honestly maybe it's just that I'm not creative enough to be an artist?

Yeah, we'll go with that.

[Kirkman]

DarkLord, I saw you connected today ... were you using IGS? And were you using a beta of 2.19? I suspect the login was rather garbled if you were using an older version.

[DarkLord]

DarkLord, I saw you connected today ... were you using IGS? And were you using a beta of 2.19? I suspect the login was rather garbled if you were using an older version.

No, I was actually using SyncTerm that time. I'll logon later tonight and try IGS from my Mega STe
and report back what I find. Thanks.

[DarkLord]

Okay, using my Mega STe - yeah, I am using an older version (2.18) so I got
mostly data (although Captain Kirk tried hard to beam up, the transporter
apparently failed).

Where can I download v2.19 so I can play with it? Thanks...

[Eero Tamminen]

Hope that helps with your interstellar sound journey.

Thanks for sharing, these look pretty nice, especially for such short code. And it's always great when somebody includes both sources and program built from them!

I tried also GIST, and main thing for me was that it actually supports MIDI input so one can easily try the created sounds (although they all sounded fairly same).

PS. I once recorded my room mate's snoring and later played it using my MIDI keyboard and STfm sampling program. For some reason my he did not appreciate the effort. It was engineering school, so maybe he just was not musical...