One Bit Sound with the ZX Spectrum

[Michael] has a thing for playing audio over beepers using a single bit. He’s done it with the Apple ][ and the IBM PC. This time he turns to the ….

One Bit Sound with the ZX Spectrum. He didn’t get quite as good a result — at least not yet — but he did manage to get some things working. He documents everything, so even though this wasn’t a successful week, there’s sometimes more to learn from reasonable failures than from unreasonable successes.

Of course, the whole thing relies on pulse code or pulse width modulation. Of the two techniques, PWM should produce better results. Some other target computers drive the buzzer through a dedicated hardware timer.

Getting multichannel music was another algorithm, and that makes for an interesting read, too.