What is 1-bit music?: “produced by repeatedly switching the current that goes to the built-in speaker on and off, or in other words, they are produced by toggling a signal between two states”. Depending on how you look at it, this is the most digital (it’s only ones and zeros with no pretense of waveforms) or least digital (it’s only 1-bit of digital precision) you can get. The challenge (as stated in Victor Adan’s phd thesis) is that the 1-bit music composer is “directly confronted with the problem of creating pitches, timbres and polyphony (parallel perceptual streams), all from a single train of pulses. With only two symbols (0 and 1) there is no ‘vertical’ information, no subtlety in the degree of push and pull. Thus, in the confines of a 1-bit music, one is forced to use time to convey all information; time is the only carrier of information. i.e., everything must be created from rhythm.” Examples and technical guidance…

Musical examples

Technical guidance