Back in 1980 when I was working on my Masters in EE, my capstone project was a chip that would play music. The problem was; that back then, the amount of ROM yo

Back in 1980 when I was working on my Masters in EE, my capstone project was a chip that would play music. The problem was; that back then, the amount of ROM you could fabricate (at least at our facility) was limited to about 1K at best. I decided to take a music class to learn a little more about music and thought that would help me with my project. The professor would play various classical pieces and lecture about them. Our homework was to go in a listening room and familiarize ourselves with the music. Everything was on vinyl so you would put a record on, listen, take notes etc. When the first exam came, the professor would take out a record, and place it on a turntable and play a piece and you were supposed to identify it. I was amazed that all the other students seemed to be getting all of them and I was struggling. I went to the professor's office hours and I explained to him my project and what I was working on. He was very intrigued and suggested that I consider Bach especially Fugue's which has a lot of repetition and cycles (good advice I ended up using Bach Toccata Fugue in D minor, which is used a lot in old timey horror movies and I just loved it). Later, after talking with other students, they showed me their "system" which was crib notes with things written on them like "Blue label with yellow text = Bethoven", things like that. In other words, they were cheating. They were making crib notes about the record labels in the listening room and paying no attention whatsoever to the music. Since the professor was so nice to me, I decided to tell him about it. He listened to what I said, and he just said "I see", then asked me about my project. He asked if he could come when I presented my project and I was thrilled he was interested. But he seemed to continue to use the records and the same method, until the final exam when he announced to the class he was going to use a new system, a Tape Deck! You could hear an audible gasp in the classroom. Needless to say, a lot of students did not do so well on the final. I got an A. I also got an A on my capstone and the EE professors were all very impressed I had taken the time to research the music and my music professor got up and said a few words for me. It was a really cool experience in my life. I hope it is OK that I shared such a long boring story, but every time I see something about a music chip like the kind in greeting cards or whatever, it kind of reminds me a little of my project and how much I enjoyed that experience. As for the technology of the chip Ken covered, it is of course, quite a bit more sophisticated than mine was, at least as memory serves me (pun intended).