Too sterile?

When I was young(er), MOD music was pretty hip on the scene. In case you don't know what I am talking about, MOD was music/sound format originally from Amiga computers in about mid 80s or so - it could play four-channel digital samples at independent rates and volumes at a time ('time' being late 80s/early 90s), which was pretty amazing at the time. MOD, or 'module' format was essentially list of samples coupled with the instructions on how to play them. Later other formats came along, and PCs also started to be able to play them - first with software, then with hardware (sound cards).
 
I, too, wrote a mod player of my own, for Sound Blaster (I'm talking about the original 8-bit one here) and Gravis UltraSound. And obviously it could play S3M format modules too, aside typical 4-32 -channel MODs and maybe few others.

These days all this sounds very primitive, and why not - it was different time. Storage space costed a pretty penny and MP3s came along only much later (along with lowered storage costs and increased CPU power - my 486 back then couldn't even decode MP3s in real time!), and today games are wasting (yes, I indeed mean that) huge amounts of space with uncompressed audio...

But all that is beside the point here.

I once asked a die-hard live music person to listen to a pretty nice mod and tell me what he thought of it. He said that it sounded too perfect. No imperfections at all. In a word, too 'sterile' for his liking.

And that it certainly is. If you ask MOD player to play a sample at note, say, F5, it will do that. Every single time, at same exact rate, at same exact speed, the same exact sample.

So I added a few small subroutines to my player. It added small random delay to samples - few tens of milliseconds or so, IIRC. It also varied the playback rate a bit - plus minus percent or so (I don't remember exact figures any more, but it was fairly subtle). It couldn't do anything to the actual digital samples, though, so those had to remain. This was maybe mid-to-late 90s.

I tried the played with this 'filter' on and off, and really couldn't tell any difference, at least that easily. I suspect I didn't play changed version for the person originally commenting about this, either. And I don't think that I tuned the playback alterations very long either - just did the changes and went on with other things.

Whether I was onto something back then, I can't really tell. And don't really care too much either, aside slight academic interest.


When sound cards moved from 8 to 16 bits and sampling at 44.1kHz, I quickly figured out that by interpolating original 8-bit samples at new sample rate, the sound could be much better. And indeed it did. I don't recall exact interpolation method I used anymore, only that it used some combination of look-up tables and fixed point math to make it cost just few clock cycles more per sample. This was still big thing, back then.

Only later, at university, I found the out the name for this issue: quantization noise.

This was around the time all MOD players started using interpolation, but there were some people that insisted that interpolation ruins the "intent of composer" as the music doesn't sound exactly as it originally was. Obviously, I chose to completely ignore this argument, as it was pretty damn obvious that less noisy signal (and this was very audible indeed!) is always better than original very noisy ones.

This all look pretty quaint these days, I'm sure.