The Register profiles a series of blog posts and online discussions celebrating how programmers squeezed surprisingly rich, multichannel-sounding music out of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum's extremely basic one-bit piezoelectric speaker, which could only be switched rapidly on and off. The piece traces this from Michael Martin's Bumbershoot Software deep-dive into 1-bit sound techniques through to the celebrated work of 1980s coder Tim Follin, showing how clever software tricks compensated for near-nonexistent audio hardware on the original 16K and 48K Spectrum models.

The article highlights that the base Spectrum (unlike the later 128 model with its AY-3-8912 sound chip) relied purely on a beeper, yet enthusiasts still produced remarkable chiptunes, such as the Manic Miner intro and a fragment of Mahler included in the original BASIC manual, later expanded into a full networked performance of Mahler's First Symphony in 2015. It also cites Tim Follin's hand-coded game soundtracks (including Agent X, Future Games and Chronos), achieved without extra hardware like the RAM Music Machine, plus demos such as Ben Daglish's Dark Fusion and Rich "Tufty" Hollins's full one-bit album ON and OFF, available on Bandcamp and YouTube.