asm.fm

No sound card driver. No audio library. Just the CPU and 44100 numbers a second.

No libc. No external calls. Sound is a list of numbers — generate the right ones, write them to a .wav, and the speaker moves. That's the whole trick.

Ground rules

• x86_64, Linux, NASM
• no libc, no external calls — syscall or nothing
• every sample computed by hand
• if it screeches, it builds character

Build

make            # binaries land in bin/

on macOS

The target is Linux, so run it in a container. Any OCI runtime works — Docker, Podman, Colima, OrbStack — they all read the same Dockerfile:

docker build -t asmfm .
docker run --rm -it -v "$PWD":/asmfm asmfm
make            # inside the container

What I actually use: OrbStack + VS Code's Dev Containers extension. "Reopen in Container" and the terminal drops straight into Linux with make ready.

Note: sample buffers live in .data, not .bss — Rosetta's x86 translation chokes on pure-bss load segments (rosetta error: bss_size overflow).

Usage

./bin/beep                  # a single square wave. the "hello world" of sound
./bin/beep > out.wav        # ...or dump it to a file and play it anywhere
aplay out.wav               # (or open it in anything — it's a real WAV)

Everything writes a valid RIFF/WAVE stream: 16-bit PCM, mono, 44.1 kHz. Pipe it, play it, keep it.

How it works

A speaker is a cone that moves in and out. Describe its position 44100 times a second and you've described a sound.

• Oscillators — square, sawtooth, triangle, and noise, generated one sample at a time. The square wave is the whole 8-bit soul: high for half a period, low for the other half.
• Pitch — a note is just a frequency. A table maps A4 -> 440 Hz, and the rest of the notes fall out from there.
• Sequencing — a tune is a list of { note, duration }. The player walks it and fills the buffer.
• Output — a hand-written 44-byte WAV header, then the raw samples. write(1, ...) and you're done.

Roadmap

The story so far — from a single beep to a real synth:

• a single beep (square wave -> WAV header -> write)
• one octave, in tune (note -> frequency table)
• a real melody, sequenced by hand
• all four oscillators (square, saw, triangle, noise for drums)
• polyphony — melody + bass + percussion at once (a tiny tracker)
  • polyphony + ADSR — the mix, now without clicks
• ADSR envelopes, so notes breathe instead of clicking
• [AMBITIOUS] an FM synth — the "fm" was never just about radio
• vibrato — the pitch, wavering gently, for a voice that's alive
• tremolo — the volume, pulsing, like a heartbeat under the note
  • strong tremolo — depth cranked up, the note pulsing rhythmically
• configurable tempo (BPM) — the same tune, fast or slow
• PWM — pulse-width modulation, the square wave that shivers
• a delay/echo — the sound, coming back to you, fading each time

Sculpting the timbre

• a low-pass filter — carve the highs, warm and mellow
• bitcrusher — crush the resolution, lo-fi and crunchy
• ring modulation — two signals multiplied, metallic and strange
• a resonant filter sweep — the "wah" that opens and closes
• distortion / overdrive — push the signal past its limits, crunchy and hot
• an auto-wah — a filter that follows the signal's own energy, funky and alive

More oscillators, stranger voices

• a supersaw — many detuned saws stacked into one huge trance lead
• hard sync — one oscillator resetting another, tearing and aggressive
• an octaver — a copy an octave below, thick and heavy like a synth bass
• additive synthesis — building a tone by stacking dozens of sines, one harmonic at a time
• phase distortion synthesis — the Casio CZ trick, bending the read-through of a wave

Space and movement

• chorus — one voice becoming many, wide and shimmering
• reverb — a room built from math, so notes have somewhere to ring
• a flanger — a swept short delay, the sound of a jet passing overhead
• a phaser — moving notches drifting through the spectrum, swirling and psychedelic
• a rotary speaker (Leslie) — a spinning voice, the swirl of a Hammond organ
• harmonic tremolo — lows and highs pulsing against each other, liquid and vintage
• a slapback delay — one short echo, rockabilly and immediate
• shimmer reverb — reflections rising into the light, ambient and celestial
• a stutter/glitch effect — sound shattered and repeated, hyperpop in assembly
• sidechain pumping — the volume breathing in time, the heartbeat of modern electronic music

Shaping the dynamics

• a compressor — taming the loud and lifting the quiet, the invisible hand of every mix
• a limiter — a hard ceiling, so nothing ever clips
• a noise gate — silence below a threshold, cutting the hiss and the dead air

Playing the machine

• an arpeggiator — chords played one note at a time, automatically
• a step sequencer — a grid of on and off, the heart of every drum machine
• drum patterns — a real beatmaker, kick and snare and hat in pure asm
• euclidean rhythms — beats spread evenly by an ancient algorithm, the pulse of techno
• swing / groove — nudging the offbeats late, so the machine feels human
• scale quantization — snapping notes to a scale, so everything plays in key
• named chords — play Cmaj7 or Dm by name, not by hand-stacked frequencies
• probability / generative notes — notes that fire by chance, music that writes itself
• a drone mode — sustained, evolving pads, ambient and endless
• microtonal tunings — stepping outside the 12 notes the West agreed on
• a text score format — compose in a file, no recompiling

The deep end — modern synthesis, hand-rolled

• wavetable synthesis — a table of shapes, morphing as it plays (the modern sound, in pure asm)
• a pitch shifter — moving the pitch without moving the time (or the reverse)
• an octave/harmony generator — building chords from a single played note
• a vocoder — one signal's voice wrapped around another, the robot that sings
• MIDI export — write out a .mid alongside the .wav, to open your work in a real DAW
• [AMBITIOUS] multi-operator FM (6 operators, DX7-style algorithms)
• [AMBITIOUS] Karplus-Strong — plucked strings from a burst of noise
• [AMBITIOUS] physical modeling — simulating a tube or a reed, breath turned to sound
• [AMBITIOUS] granular synthesis — sound broken into a thousand grains, clouds of texture
• [AMBITIOUS] concatenative synthesis — reassembling fragments of real sound, collage as instrument
• [AMBITIOUS] convolution reverb — the fingerprint of a real hall, not a mathematical guess
• [AMBITIOUS] a full tracker interface — patterns, instruments, per-column effects, the FastTracker way
• [AMBITIOUS] a terminal waveform visualizer, drawing the sound as it plays
• [UNREASONABLE] spectral processing — an FFT in pure assembly, painting sound in frequencies
• [UNREASONABLE] real-time output straight to the sound card (/dev/dsp, then ALSA)

Experiments

Little side-by-side tests, for hearing what a single feature actually does:

• melody_hard vs melody_smooth — the same solo melody with hard note edges vs a strong ADSR envelope. Play them back to back: one clicks, the other breathes.
• polyphony_adsr — polyphony and envelopes combined: the three-voice mix with per-note ADSR, so nothing clicks.

Why?

Because I'd made the CPU count, sort, hash, and draw — but never sing.

Useful resources

• the WAV/RIFF spec (it's mercifully short)
• the equal-temperament formula (twelve notes, one ratio)
• Intel® 64 and IA-32 manuals, still ~5000 pages, still bedtime reading
• a rubber duck with perfect pitch