AY-3-8910 vs. The World

It may not be as well known as the MOS 6581 Sound Interface Device (more commonly referred to as the SID chip) found in the Commodore 64, but the General Instrument AY-3-8910 programmable sound generator provided the beeps and boops for a generation of video gamers all the same. This sound chip was first produced in 1978, and was used in arcade and pinball games, the Intellivision and Vectrex game consoles, and in the Apple II and TRS-80 Color Computer.

Given how widely used this chip was in its heyday, it was clearly very capable. But just how good was it? YouTuber InazumaDenki put this sound generator through its paces to find out. The goal was to reproduce a variety of real-world sounds to see how convincing the version produced by the AY-3-8910 might be. Spoiler alert — it was not great, but the results were entertaining nonetheless.

InazumaDenki worked out a process to reproduce real-world sounds that involved capturing a recording of them, then converting the audio into a spectrogram. From there, the spectrogram was manually examined to identify the frequencies with the greatest energy. Up to three of these were picked in each case as the AY-3-8910 has a set of three tone generators. Next, the frequencies were encoded into integer values and loaded into the appropriate registers in the chip to cause the tones to be generated.

In the first test, InazumaDenki attempted to reproduce the beeping sounds of a pedestrian crossing in Hong Kong. The AY-3-8910’s version was pretty good in this case, although that may not be entirely surprising since it is a pretty simple beeping sound. Given that initial success, InazumaDenki next tried to mimic the sound of a bird call. Things started to break down a bit in this case, with the result only being vaguely reminiscent of the original.

The remaining tests attempted to reproduce the sound of a jackhammer, which also got the AY-3-8910’s noise generator in on the action, and a sports whistle. Both results were reasonably good, but definitely not good enough to trick anyone into believing they were the real thing.

If you would like to dig deeper into the weird possibilities offered by the AY-3-8910, I did some work with it myself that you can check out, where I attempted to synthesize speech. It was a more involved process in which I produced a set of spectrograms representing a wide range of sounds the chip can make, then broke down a clip of speech into small segments. I then compared the segments with the possible chip sounds to find the closest match before stitching them all together. The result was pretty rough, but it did sort of work. I also developed a Python library to interact with the chip for this project, so it is worth checking out even if you want to do more traditional things with your AY-3-8910.