The amount of voices a PSG could provide varied between the different chips. 15 One of the most compositionally influential of these restrictions (and defining characteristic of computer music of the period) is the PSGs limited polyphony. Each PSG however, had a set of numerous musical limitations the composer would have to adhere to. Many of these musicians, such as Hirokazu ‘Hip’ Tanaka, treated the computer (in Tanaka’s case, the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES)) as a means of expressing ‘serious’ music and approached their composition as such 14. Perhaps one of the main reasons for the ubiquity of PSGs in video game applications is the medium’s requirement for a multimedia experience 9, with the desire for sound effects and music in electronic games predating software games 10.ĭue to the prevalence of inexpensive computers, the eighties saw the emergence of a synergy of both programmer and composer practices due to both software accessibility and thus increased development in entertainment software 11 12 13. The chips were also included in early home computers 7, especially those with gaming capabilities the most popular example being the Commodore 64’s PSG, the SID chip 8. As such, PSGs were commonly utilised in the video game systems of the 1980s to mid 1990s, for example the Nintendo Entertainment System (Ricoh 2A03/2A07) 4, Atari 2600 (Atari TIA) 5, Sega Master System (Texas Instruments SN76489A, Yamaha YM-2413) 6 and numerous others. 2 3 This became a commercially viable option for computational sound generation as part as an affordable home system. One of the main reasons for the popularity of PSGs was that microcontrollers capable of generating pitches had become cheap enough to manufacture at the beginning of the 1980s. The general benefit of the sound chip was that audio processing could be delegated to a dedicated system, freeing processing cycles for other functions, or simply, as Radio-Electronics magazine 1981 explains, “ music or sound effects from software, without overtaxing the computer”. PSGs were designed to be instructed by software commands and would usually be housed alongside a microprocessor as part of a computer system. 1 PSGs are often called sound chips, however not all sound chips are PSGs. Feel free to leave comments, and do let us know if you would like to send us articles to share with the wider community!Ī programmable sound generator (PSG) is an integrated circuit (IC) with the ability to generate sound by synthesizing basic waveforms. We are proud to publish the following article by Blake Troise ( ThinkSpace, ProtoDome) as part of our contributor articles series.

Nes music generator