I recently read a couple of books that have links to sound and audio in different domains.
Keza Macdonald’s Super Nintendo: How One Japanese Company Helped the World Have Fun (Guardian Faber, London, 2026). It is a journalistic run over the history of secretive company through their games and systems. My previous 1980s experience of Donkey Kong consoles made me intrigued. I had hoped to the find out more about coding the sound across varying platforms, from cartridges to the Nintendo Switch across the different times.
There’s probably a distant reading of the Nintendo platform that could be extracted from this. I digress…
What was frustrating was the lack of sound discussion as it moves from chiptunes to fully fledged sounds. Some recent work on BASIC (to be presented next month) has had me thinking about the underlying aspects, such as chips and the language used to programme the machines, such as 6502 assembly or C/C++.
At least Thomas Dolby’s The Speed of Sound (Icon Books, London, 2017) discussed some of the file aspects and challenges of his audio system on Nokia and other phones. I did see that his file format, which needs further investigation, gave some insight as to what was left out and enacted form of reduced audio that could be mapped to the associated file.
I am hoping that these will be of use in the present project on the representation of sound and its relationship to computing. I had hoped that this would be a software related project, but the hardware is an important part of this.
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