MU2300 Final Project Jonathan Tran

The final project that I have created for MU2300 involved making songs using a music tracker. Two songs have been made inside the tracker and have been converted into a modern audio format (.wav) for standard listening.

What is a music tracker?

A music tracker is a type of software that allows for number-based composition of music. Notes are arranged in a vertical timeline that is divided into multiple channels. Any notes, parameters, and effects are entered in a grid system by a series of codes. These codes are a combination of numbers, letters, and hexadecimal values. Music trackers were first created in the late 1980s as a way to compose music using the hardware available at the time. This was the era of 16-bit computing, and low-powered hardware, such as sound chips (if they were even present at all on some computers), and speakers, often limited the fidelity of audio feedback from a personal computer. During the 1990s, the usage of trackers was substantial, as it provided a relatively easy way to compose music. This coincided with the personal computer being more of an accessible commodity to people. The monetary and space expenses of a traditional studio set was now not entirely necessary - anyone with access to a home computer can start making music. By the early 2000s, the introduction of CD-ROM as an audio storage format essentially removed trackers from popular use. Combined with better audio recording techniques and more powerful computer hardware being produced, the use of trackers ended as quickly as it began.

The tracker used in question is Milkytracker, an open-source clone of Fasttracker II, which itself is a popular tracker originally released in 1994 for MS-DOS systems.

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