Having grown up with video games in the 8 and 16-bit eras (e.g., NES, SNES, Megadrive, C64), I am attracted to retro graphics and sounds from this era. Music with a limited palette of blips, beeps, noise, and such, can be surprisingly versatile – just look at scores from Mario to Zelda, and 8-bit/blip/chiptunes are definitely emerging as an popular alternative style (check out lsdj). My recent work with Beads has led me to build an 8-bit inspired sound synthesizer that runs in a web browser – Jsfxr. It is a clone of sfxr, a nifty retro sound effect generator. While Jsfxr doesn’t compare to the original, it is fun to play with and demonstrates that Beads and Processing can play nice together. Building it also taught me how the coin blip from Mario can be generated. :)