Bytebeat: Experimental music from very short C programs

Ville-Matias Heikkilä (viznut) · demo · Watch on YouTube

What it is

Viznut demonstrates bytebeat, experimental music generated by extremely short C programs. It is the first of a series of videos on the technique.

HN calls it the video that started the one-line-code music trend and recommends exploring the demoscene author's channel.

“Viznut (a legendary Finnish democoder) did some experiments to see how short you could code something that still sounds at least interesting”
Viznut's experiments with very short programs that make interesting music
bemmu, 2014-06 · Recommendation · in “A texture-mapped raycaster in 128 bytes”
“The video that started it all”
The original video that started the one-line music trend
creamyhorror, 2015-10 · Recommendation · in “Algorithmic symphonies from one line of code (2011)”
“Check out the rest of his channel.”
Experimental music from very short C programs by a demoscene author
msarnoff, 2015-11 · Recommendation · in “Software developers describing their work in 1973 [video]”
“I've seen these floating around on YouTube, so you might have some luck searching there”
Example of music from tiny programs with a longer write-up
rzzzt, 2023-06 · Recommendation · in “Play (1) Linux manual page”

Excerpts from Hacker News comments, linked to the originals. Summaries and labels were written by a language model from those comments.

Topics: bytebeat, viznut, demoscene, algorithmic music, c programming