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The music is 8-bit.

Accordion is a rare instrument in daily life. It has a history of 200 years. It is an instrument with classical temperament.

An accordion has two separate keyboards, each held in one hand. The user needs to push and pull the accordion, so that the air through the bellows in the reed vibration sound, then press and hold different keys, can make the accordion emit different notes.

The Commodore 64 (C64), an 8-bit home computer first introduced in 1982, is the highest-selling single computer model ever. Today, C64 can basically be regarded as an electronic antique, and its status is equivalent to that of accordion in musical instruments.

A software engineer from Sweden noticed the retro commonality between the two. He found two C64 computers, and after a lot of DIY hardware and software, he created a unique accordion.

The English word for accordion is Accordion, and this accordion built with Commodore 64 was named "Commodon" by him. Commodordion uses the integrated circuit chip of C64 to output audio signal, and the sound played is also 8-bit style music.

In a YouTube video posted by the software engineer, he himself plays a song called Maple Leaf Rag on the instrument. The original was composed by African-American composer Scott Joplin in 1899 and, with various interpretations of Commodordion, became like background music used in video games in the 1980s.

The software engineer, who studied both programming and music theory, was Linus Åkesson. According to Oxon's own account on his website, the inspiration dates back to 2008, and he has developed a number of hardware and software projects for it.

The two projects officially released by Oxon in 2021 can be said to form the basis of Commodordion.

The first project was Sixtyforgan. Oxon built a C64 into an instrument similar to an electronic organ and connected the C64 to a spring reverb box commonly used in electric guitars or electronic organs to create a variety of reverb effects.

C64 and Reverberation Box In designing the notes for the C64 keyboard, Oxon referred to the real semitone button accordion: moving the finger to the lower right raises the pitch of the button by one semitone; moving the finger to the upper right raises the pitch by one full tone. To accommodate this pattern, the keyboard will have a number of repeated keys, providing more possible finger options.

The second project in the key layout diagram is "Qwertuoso." This is a 3.9kB program written by Oxen that allows the C64's built-in sound chip to play music in real time after receiving the signal.

With these two projects, Oxon spent three and a half years designing and producing the Commodordion. According to the plan, the C64 on his right hand side should be responsible for the theme, the C64 on his left hand side should play chords, and the keyboard of both machines should adopt Sixtyforgan layout.

Oxon custom-built a power supply to start both C64s at the same time. It takes only one second from the time the machine is turned on to the time it is ready, but since there is no monitor attached, it is impossible to visualize this process visually. The C64 generally uses boxed cassettes to run programs, but Oxen opted for an external cassette simulator, which allows two C64s to load Oxen's own programs with a single shortcut key.

The program installed on the slightly bloated left-hand C64 on the back is a variant of Qwertuoso, which can switch between live performance mode and programming mode. It can also store up to 4 chords recorded in advance into memory and play them cyclically through F1, F3, F5 and F7.

The corrugated hose connecting the two C64s took Oxon a lot of work. Bellows consist of a large number of 5.25-inch discarded floppy disks that are cut into specific shapes and then fixed with adhesive tape. Each fold on the bellows consists of three floppy disks spliced together, a total of 16 folds, which requires at least 48 floppy disks.

"Not a single good floppy disk was harmed during this video shoot," said Oxon, who squeezed the bellows, which expelled air through a hole left open on the left-hand side. A microphone is installed outside the hole, which will act as a reed in an ordinary accordion. The reed makes a sound as the air moves, and the microphone converts the noise created by the air flow into a digital signal in real time, adjusting the output volume according to the force and noise of the accordion.

Finally, Oxon used a mixer board to combine the digital signals from the two computers and microphones and convert them back into analog signals to get the music we heard.

DAC stands for digital-to-analog signal converter, and Oxon admits that Commodordion has one big flaw that can't be ignored: poor ergonomics. The left-hand machine is perfectly symmetrical to the right-hand machine, while the right-hand C64 requires precise input of the theme and cannot be moved. When squeezing the bellows, the left wrist, arm and shoulder should all exert an extra force. In actual performance, it is difficult for the left hand to touch most keys on the keyboard, let alone hold the accordion to open the programming mode to record chords.

Playing the accordion is also more difficult than playing other instruments because you can't see what your hands are doing when you play the accordion. Mirrors can help, but ultimately muscle memory is needed to master them.

The U key on the keyboard is glued with a small red sticker, so that Oxon can touch the corresponding note in time. Although the Commoddion lacks the potential to be a viable instrument, the 8-bit music played with it has a unique tone. It was designed as a love letter from Oxon to the past, but more like some kind of fantastic vision of the instrument of the future that humans had thirty or forty years ago.

This article comes from Weixin Official Accounts: Game Research Society (ID: ysaag), author: Zhao Yue

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