You can really crank it up and feel like it’s the 1980’s again and you are in a fancy theatre.
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Yeah I turned my monitors up to max and was blown away and ready for Star Wars!
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Based on what I’ve read, it was 100% computer-generated. He said somewhere that about 300 lines of code were used to create the oscillators (which were generating a cello-like waveform) and a similar amount of code drove the score (controlling the pitch, etc). And that was run by a virtual rack system that was something like 200,000 lines of code.
I do wonder what language they used. CSOUND or a derivative? There was lots of heavy-duty computer-generated sound back then, especially in the Bay Area thanks to CCRMA.
He said that 30 oscillators was the max that the system could generate in realtime. If I am not mistaken, those systems generated audio in realtime and the audio was recorded to tape.
My electronic music composition prof (in 1978) at a SoCal junior college had just spent the summer at CCRMA and said that after working all summer writing the code for a computer music piece, he discovered that CCRMA had a single poorly maintained 1/2" reel-to-reel and he didn’t discover till he got back to LA that the heads on the recorder hadn’t been cleaned in months and so the tape didn’t do justice to what it sound like in the room.
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