Jean-Michel Jarre’s ‘Oxygene 4’ Recreated with 19KB of JavaScript

I am obliged by HN tradition to bring up A Mind Is Born, which packs a decent piece of music and its video into 256 bytes:

http://linusakesson.net/scene/a-mind-is-born/

The Dittytoy engine is just a tiny layer that calls the code of the ditty 44100 per second. So the whole sound wave synthesis is done in the code of the ditty.

Because both of them picked some basic idea (FM synthesis and sequencing, message passing and isolated state), then refined it to an extreme degree of purity, ignoring irrelevant parts of tradition and convention.

It's a rare combination of simplicity and richness.

I can’t speak for America but he was a household name in the U.K.

I would say so yes, given he's in the Guinness Book of Records for one of the highest attended free concerts of all time (Moscow, 1997 with ~3.5 million people). He's also in 4th and 8th place, with 2.5 million in Paris in 1990 and Houston TX in 1986 with 1.3 million people respectively.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-attended_conce...

Spanish here, in the early 80s he was fairly popular here and would be played in the top pop music stations, although to many adults it felt strange and experimental. I was a little kid when I asked to get The Concerts in China for xmas and my parents were like WTF.

I think Jarre was quite popular in ex Yugoslavia. In part because his music was used on TV in the 80s, for intros, background music for education shows, etc. I wouldn't be surprised if it was not fully licensed at that time.

Brazilian here, Rendez-Vous was the first music cassette tape I ever bought.

US-based commenter here, I first heard JMJ in the soundtrack to the 1988 gaqme "Captain Blood" by ERE Informatique/Exxos which is a clip of Ethnicolor from Zoolook. Oxygene IV was advertised on TV in "Pure Moods" and a lot of other new-age compilations.

In the late 80's and early 90's, while I was college student in US, I was interested in listening to MOD files with protracker, etc on my Amiga 500, and I discovered his music through it, available via usenet (as this was pre-www days)

> Was Jarre popular outside of France?

As I recall it Jarre was a semi-god in Japan. He made incredible concert there and had a gigantic following. I think he was bigger in japan than in France.

Jarre was definitely popular across Europe in the 1980s.

I was introduced to him around 1987 with Oxygène and Équinoxe, and always loved his 1970s and 80s albums, though I agree that he went out of fashion pretty early. As far as I'm concerned, he probably peaked creatively with Zoolook (1984), and I haven't really cared since Waiting for Cousteau. His later work isn't exactly bad, it's just the exact same formula he's been following for 40+ years.

If not a household name, at least a weekly household sound for kiwis as Oxygène was used in the title credits of Our World on a Sunday evening.

https://youtu.be/wnPR9IoaTFc

What's with the 'was'? He's still quite popular and his music is played fairly regularly, not less frequently than other artists of that day except for the likes of Queen & Bowie. Just like Vangelis. Quite a bit of music from that era is simply never played at all, but Jarre's work still features in the same places that it did back then: as background to videos and on the PA of the local supermarket. The latter is quite funny: he had a record called 'Musique pour supermarche', to see it used like that 40 years later ...

NL was a good market for Jarre though, he was extremely popular here back then.

Quite popular in Portugal, I have several VHS tapes from his concerts.

Oh, he was very well known in USSR / Russia in the late 80s / early 90s. My friend was a DJ on a radio station back then, and she once played his music for an entire night -- and got a call from a listener who thanked her and said that it changed his life.

As for his present-day popularity among younger people, it isn't as high as that of, for example, Queen or Pink Floyd -- though I had a ride with a young Uber driver who was entranced with Les Chants Magnétiques that we heard playing on the car radio.

And as for me personally, I currently have three of his songs in my Spotify favorites.

Oxygene was part of the sound track for the Peter Weir (Dead Poet's Society, The Truman Show) film Gallipoli (1981); an interesting choice for a movie set in 1915.

He was certainly a thing in the US not long after release.

In India, Kraftwerk was always more easily available, since the mid 70s.

Jarre was known of, but records weren't easily available. We would swap cassette tapes. That changed in the mid 80s.

It seems like a lot of sci-fi shows used to try to copy his music to impress futurism.

Yeap. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRzzF-WObYE

Didn't grow up in France and he was one of my favourite artists of my youth. I could hear his popular tracks as background music on TV and radio but I doubt people knew the artist behind the music.

More recently in a lot of interviews of djs and producers in European EDM scene, they reported that they were inspired to start a music career by him.

I grew up in NZ and was popular there with broad range of listeners. Oxygene was one of the first vinyls I bought.

Pretty popular in the UK. His Destination Docklands concert had about 100K people (in atrocious weather) and was quite a notable spectacle. Something I remember from my childhood.

He was huge in Poland in the eighties, at least in the circles I hang out in. For the more geeky kids he was as well recognized as Michael Jackson among the pop listening crowd. Marek Biliński was a very distant second.

Same on Firefox

Same on Firefox, but it does sound good in between stutters.

Sounds great on M1 Safari.

Fair amount of stuttering here too in Safari/Orion on a Xeon W-2140B iMac Pro.

On my machine, it’s pretty good in Edge, but stutters in Firefox.

Same here, on a quite powerfull Thinkpad graphics workstation.

Huh - I'm on a weedy ThinkPad X1 Nano with a i5-1130G7 on Debian / testing and it's playing fine under Chrome, barely touching 10% of one processor core.

This runs fine in Safari on a MBA M2

I experienced the same, but once I enabled JIT (disabled "Advanced Security" for the site), it was smooth.

Smooth on a 12 year old Mac Mini with Safari - hooked to the living room stereo and powering a little retro party right now. Love it!

Infuriatingly stuttery for me on Firefox (on Linux; AMD Ryzen 5900X, so not exactly underpowered; plenty of RAM but very weedy GPU) but perfectly smooth on Chrome. It would be interesting to know whether this is something Chrome does better or whether it's just that Chrome and Firefox are different and whoever made this only tested/optimized it in Chrome.

similar to others, for me stutters like crazy in Firefox but only a tiny bit of stutter in Brave (aka Blink/Chrome)

Firefox / Fedora / i7-6700HQ @ 8x 3.5GHz also struggles, encountering a problem typical of a high school orchestra:

> Performance error: strings can't keep up.

It does not make any sound on my M1 iPad.

I think the cool thing about this version is that the whole sound wave (including the code for the synthesizers) is generated by one single piece of javascript (<19 kb). So it is more about the code itself than the code size.

You probably like this ditty:

let t=0; synth.def(() => (255&(1|63(63&63+8Math.sin(t++/2e5)t/2e5)&100Math.tan(4Math.PIt/2e5)/4Math.sin(4Math.PI[165,220,175,262,196,147,220,165][7&(2t/2e5&12t/2e5^8t/2e5)]t/2e5)|2048(1+(1&t/4/2e5))t/2e5))/127-1).play(0,{env:one});

https://dittytoy.net/ditty/7c700fc1c3

Interesting. You have a reference? Been listening to his music for ~40 years and this is the first I hear that.

Amusingly, then, I was introduced to Jarre's music through a little C-64 demo[1] that came as an extra on one of my pirated floppy disks back in the '80s, which contained a SID rendition of one of his songs. The whole music lineup on that demo was awesome[2]. It had an unusually large influence on the "tree" of electronic music artists I went on to discover in my youth.

1: https://csdb.dk/release/?id=34955

2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vSNPCcDAAE

The last page (ie. earliest submissions) are small examples, take a peek at those.

Edit: there's also a syntax reference mentioned in them: https://dittytoy.net/syntax

Stutters badly on FireFox on my desktop (Win10 Ryzen 4 core), stutters a little on Edge.

and here's the real original on JMJ's channel:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSIMVnPA994

Comment lines 361-394 ("strings"). The message box says that this instrument can not keep up on my machine.

Stutters on my old gaming PC on Firefox as well, but runs smooth on chrome.

It stutters for me when I have the tab in focus. What I switch to another tab the stuttering goes away. I guess it's the animations that are bogging down my Intel MBA.

The idea that you can fit music in "16kb" is not really shocking, music notation has achieved the same or better for centuries.

There's a vast world of musical programming languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_audio_programming_lang...

PureData and SuperCollider are some of the bigger "more active" free ones these days. Others like Csound are successors to languages like MUSIC-N, which goes back to the 1950s. The same year that Fortran got started...

Often these aren't 100% typing like other languages and there are things that generates some of this code such as a midi keyboard.

You can use the Linux tool amidi to read from the midi device and various unix tricks to get things into your code. There's many compact cheap midi keyboards and controllers on the market. You can even use a tablet or phone and tap the screen as a virtual music instrument or use the 6DOF sensor to imitate analog inputs.

Some people will sit around and type it all out, but there's some pretty basic ways to avoid that exhaustion.

I personally think the world of musical programming languages with novel interfaces and meta-languages is still very under-explored.

I think 'blogspam' is a bit harsh. This blog entry provides a bit of context and lightly discusses the Dittytoy site and gives credit to the arranger.

disagree, the url contextualizes what one's looking at in that other URL.

> Edit: Oh and 2 Gb of samples.

You're just pulling this out of your ass. There are no samples. All the sounds are actually generated by the 19kb of JS + the dittytoy API which provides a pretty low-level set of helpers to build synths and sequence notes.

I can't figure out how big/small the dittytoy API is but 40MB or 2GB are both ridiculous.

Where on earth did you get the last two numbers? The total network download for the entire page, including GUI, images, fonts, google tracking BS and everything else, is only 536KB. The track will then play in full, offline.