The Sound of Playing:

In 2007 Alex Yabsley (dot.ay) made an ethnographic study of the chiptune community, which is available online: The Sound of Playing. This may be very old news, but since it is 39 pages I wanted to give it some attention and mention some of the parts I liked in particular. I hope you don’t mind that I bring out your old university work, Alex! : )

He made interviews or questionnaires for 7 participants from the UK, Sweden, and USA, and also did participatory studies of 8bitcollective and micromusic.net. Statistically speaking, seven people is not representative for a large subculture, but that is usually not the point with a qualitative study anyway. I think Alex rightly generalizes some of the results.

* Chip music composers usually talk about limitations when they motivate why they make chip music, and secondly about timbre. Newcomers seem instead to talk about this culture being “fresh and new”, what Alex describes as cultural reasoning rather than musical creative reason. No one really talks about videogames. Far from everyone has a background with making alternative electronic music.

* “Whilst the demoscene is responsible for much of the infrastructure on which modern Chiptunes are built, it seems that it has become quite a separate community. However, it is a noticeable phenomenon that, as newcomers become more informed of the history of Chiptunes, they develop an interest in the demoscene.” I would like to add that they were always quite separated, considering the low amount of chip musicians from the demoscene that are active outside of it. But I think Alex has an interesting point in that chip music has become a gateway-culture for the heavier stuff!

* “[..] Småm believes that just playing sequences back and pretending your doing something is something of a live standard for Game Boy musicians. This is partly the case.” Is it really? Do you know of any chip musicians that play more live than others? I was once forced to play my only ever Gameboy-only set (due to other broken hardware) in a forest in Gothenburg a few years ago (with Småm actually). I thought it went alright enough though, since I always enjoyed improvising with LSDj. Does it get boring after a while, or why do Gameboyers not do more things live?

* The part about the compositional effect of technology was very good and could have been even longer! Bitshifter’s answer about Nanoloop versus LSDj is spot on about how most chip music software uses traditional notation while Nanoloop doesnot, encouraging music that is more focused on texture and rhythm rather than melody. Pixelh8 said “If you were painting a picture you wouldn’t ask someone else to choose your colours would you?” referring to him making his own software. I think a better musical metaphor for colours is the timbre of the sounds, ie the audio waveforms inherent to a chip. Software is more like the brush and canvas, to me. Most brushes and canvases do a very similar work, but a few stand out from the rest either by offering variety or novelty.

* Chip music composers gain more from listening to chip music than an average consumer. By having used the same hard- and software, you know what is easy and difficult, and worthy of admiration. “This further builds and develops both the community and the quality of work produced, as the limitations allow for a simple shared understanding, which is how the demoscene has operated for years and how it continues to be a system conducive to high quality creative work.” A very good point, I thought. Although some would say it is elitist technofetishism, you could might aswell call it craftmanship. That makes me think why there are not more competitions at, say, 8bitcollective.

* Hope you got a good grade .AY!

Chip Music Toilet?

Just an informative interlude….

Over at internet2007 we can find, among other obscurities, links to “one hit wonders” – search queries that only give one hit (it’s harder than you think). Of course, once you read about them there, they have turned into two hit wonders, since Google sniffs your pants faster than you think.

The last post relates to chip music, and more precisely the lack of (academic) research on it. There is of course more research than Google Scholar shows, but living in times when the map is more correct than reality and when Google makes the map, this is the Truth!

So, the 4th most relevant scholarly material on chip music is about … toilets! With chip music! It is not really academic research (yet!) but a patent – something that Google apparently is indexing these days, as part of scholarly research. Check it out!

7. A toilet according to one of the claims 1 to 6,

characterized in

that the device (20) or only the printed wiring board (electronics) for emitting acoustical speech and/or music information is placed fixed or removable on the support (60) and only the speech chip/music chip or microchip on the printed wiring board/device is replaceable (for example by a plug-in contact) in order to reprogramm or to respeak the speech chip/music chip/microchip.

The BliepBliep Exhibition

Did you know that Bleep in English is Bliep in Dutch and Piep in German [update: Piip in Finnish]? I learnt this at BliepBliep in Rotterdam that I mentioned before. It is an exhibition about computer sounds, and it seems most suitable for kids, who seemed to enjoy playing some old videogames. They had C64, Atari VCS, Sega Mastersystem, NES, Vectrex, and the other usual (European) suspects, and they were tucked away in cabinets with custom made controls for them. I would have preferred the original controls, since this made you miss the most obvious connection with the machine – the control interface.

They had a number of educational games aswell. One cabinet had a number of computers and peripherals, and you were supposed to connect sounds to the corresponding object. On another screen you could sample sounds and play it back while altering the bit rate and sample rate, to show what kind of quality the older systems work with (or, to teach future composers about bitcrushing?).The thing I liked the most was a sort of patch bay to show how people (usually women) operated computers five decades ago. It reminded me of why I was in Rotterdam in the first place, namely to patch analogue synthesizers.

There was also one installation where you could compose your own computer music. You could sequence predefined loops to make some kind of trance music. Most computer music might be arranged in loops, but I think this retro-style exhibition would gain more from relating to how the loops are made. The chip style way of composing (bit by bit, from scratch) seems more relevant than how to make music with long samples (”sound block around moving fever“).

But it became more clear that they wanted to relate to contemporary music in another cabinet, where you could listen to computer music. There was trance, breakcore, ambient, jumpen (Dutch for jumpstyle) and so on, with one song for each genre. Chiptune was represented by Nullsleep (with the track Chippon), which is a good choice. The genre 8bit was represented by Crystal Castles with the track Courtship Dating, which might not be an equally satisfying choice for everyone. Elsewhere, you could also listen to parts of Monty on the Run by Rob Hubbard and Cybernoid 2 by Jeroen Tel.

All in all – I think this exhibition gives an insight into the history of computers and consoles, and provides some fun for the gamers. It was competently put together in general, but it would have been even better if they connected this exhibition with the 10 year anniversary of micromusic.net, or the 10 year anniversary of C-men, or maybe most importantly the people around Rotterdam that use 8-bit hardware for music and visuals. Sometimes these kinds of exhibitions might perpetuate an image of old computers as old and unuseable rather than interesting media in themselves.

“The violation of law is actually larger than the Sun”

Earlier today an article was posted with news on the Timbaland data drama (Finnish, bad google translation). Tempest, the original composer of Acidjazzed Evening, has stopped being active in this battle, but GRG (who made the C64-cover that Timbaland supposedly sampled) is still fighting the fight, as previously reported. The first battle was lost, despite presenting extensive research with frequency analyses and apparently also proving the effort and skills involved in doing C64-music by playing 5 different SID-versions of Popcorn. In court! That might be the best thing to come out of this whole ordeal.

But now Kernel Records, representing GRG, has went to the US to sue Furtado, Universal, Timbaland, and more! Once again, courts will have to face yer typical judicial questions like “How can modern technology reproduce cycle-exact reproductions of a C64-song?”, “How relevant are frequency analyses considering the possibilities of post-production and the differences between single SID-chips and SID-players?”, or even “Is a SID-tune to be regarded as recorded music, sheet music, or live performances?”. Let’s hope that after the years that these legal discussions are bound to take, we can find some peace of mind in these matters!

Coincidence, Homage or Theft?

Over at CSDb there have been some new discoveries about sampling/covering C64-music. What would you call these?

Anggune – Seize The Moment (2009). Uses the same key and mostly the same notes as in Rob Hubbards track for International Karate. Watch youtube clips here and here. What makes it troublesome to me is that it could have been a coincidence (it is not the most elaborate piece of music?), but more importantly that Hubbard borrowed the theme from Ryuichi Sakamoto & David Sylvian (youtube). I’ve decided not to add this to the plagiarism page. Seems like Anggune is most similar to Sakamoto & Sylvian after all. :)

Abe Duque – Champagne Days, Cocaine Nights (2003). Extensively samples the C64-tune Knight Tyme by David Whittaker. Excerpt from Duque’s tune here. According to discogs credits are in the notes of the record. Hmm, well. Added to the plagiarism page, although I would more call it sampling than plagiarising.

Harmonic 313 – Cyclotron C64sid (2009?). This is apparently a new artist on the Warp roster, and he has made this mash-up that contains samples from video games. It is pretty difficult to spot the originals though – BMX Kidz and Gods probably, Arkanoid most definitely. But the point is maybe that this 1 minute song reaks of “sampling aesthetics”. It is meant to sound fragmented and eclectic, and the sources of the samples are either hard or irrelevant to spot (since it’s only snippets). The aura referenced is 80s videogames in general, not specific ones. In short, this is what I would call fair use.

Minimum Data >> Maximum Content

The VJ-festival Cimatics are running an online exhibition, so I have just “curated” something called Minimum Data >> Maximum Content. It is a tiny presentation of what people have achieved with 1024 bytes or less. I will return to this subject many times in the future, because it relates to many things I try to approach in this blog: maximising technology, not exploit limitations but embrace possibilities, hug bugs, media specificity, posthumanism, and so forth. In the mean time, enjoy the three lonely videos I have posted, and check an 8bittoday-post, and check how you can make cinema material in 4 kilobytes here. (warning for superman trance) And remember: recordings are sooo 20th century. 256 bytes look better than 256 megabytes!

(Some chip music curiosa: behind the name ate bit , included in my selection, we find 4-mat who is often blamed for inventing chip music with Amiga songs around 1990. Back when chip music was sample-based and semi-nostalgic music, *cough*. Nowadays he codes incredible tiny productions for 8-bit machines, like the recent interactive “DJ-tool” for Spectrum called 1kdj.)

2.0 Dub Brains

Sometimes it feels like all this 2.0 web stuff just makes you lazy and only keep up with your usual RSS-feeds. Hm, so I need your help to keep up with Metrodub, which I found out about today at 8BC. Right now there are two dubstep-ish tracks by Minikomi. Coming up next is the Japanese Shex, who happens to be one of my favourite artists! It is playful, non-aggressive chaos-music , and with very tasty bits of chippery here and there. So stay tuned, and tune me in too, and drop out the 2.0!

For your weekend needs, please tune in to The Brain which is dj absurdities involving the french mastermind Puyo Puyo. Hello.

Handmade Electronic Music: Bending vs Building

In 2006, Nicolas Collins‘ released his book Handmade Electronic Music (Google’s pirate copy here). Yesterday he presented the second edition at STEIM in Amsterdam, an institute which has been active in this area for 40 years already. Collins has similar authority on the subject, being a professor of Sound and a very experienced low-level sound art performer.

I haven’t read the book, but if little-scale lists it as an inspiration it is probably a very good read. I went to the presentation expecting to get an insight into this practice, since I think it is interestingly placed inbetween chip music and circuit bending. It is more than just circuit bending because it doesn’t rely on readymade systems (just components). It is like chip music in the sense that all the audio/music is handmade; it doesn’t use large chunks of sampled audio or algorithmic compositional elements (like most other electronic music).

Nic (btw, not Nick) started with two performances: one with a group of people poking a circuit board to make sounds, the other one with a lit candle performing similar sounds. Fire-driven music is nice stuff and with Nic blowing wind on the candle, the sounds would change. So now, in a broad sense, there is chip music made with fire, wind and water. Hope to see more elements!

“Last time I was here I talked so much, so this time I will show examples instead”. Assuming that everybody was there the last time, Nic instead ran the DVD included in the book. It was like a very long Youtube session with 1 minute clips of handmade electronic music. Definitely very interesting, for a while, but it was not what I was hoping for. The clips were more like tech-demos and noise than performances with musical instruments. That statement is of course leaning towards musical conservatism, but sometimes we need that too, eh? : ) I can continue along those lines by saying that most of the devices made very similar sounds. You know, those scratchy and pitchy pulse wave sounds that the Cracklebox at STEIM made already in the 1970s. If you’re not in the mood, it gets pretty tiresome after a while..

But I also think that chipmusic and demoscene practitioners could learn a lot from the conceptual and noisy ways of sound art and circuit bending/”building”. It is funny how circuit bending, chip music, and the demoscene is sometimes presented as related to eachother, eventhough they are so different. Chip music is (too often) about 4/4 happy bleep pop and using default samples of LSDJ. Demoscene music is (too often) about perfectionism and competition. Circuit bending is (too often) about tech-concepts and predictable noise.

What they do share, is a fascination with the possibilities (aka limitations) of hardware that is old or open (enough). In the demoscene, hardware is losing some of its priority to make room for emulators and design/concepts instead of coding brilliance. Chip music seems to get more tech-fundamental at the moment, and as for circuit bending I guess that hardware will keep on playing a vital role (eventhough “software bending” such as glitchNES has appeared). What it ultimately amounts to, is a discussion on what a technological system is and also if/how a computer composer can operate independent from capitalism and culture. (any suggestions? hehe)

I think that “handmade” goes just as much for software as hardware. You often forgot the extent to which some chip music is handmade. At the end of the day, that might be more relevant than the mantra of “commodity subversion” and if so, maybe chipmusic is more similar to circuit “building” than circuit bending. Well. Just continuing the ramblings about how to contextualize and explain chip music so we don’t have to be blamed for being DJs/gamers on stage. We can play as much or as little live as other electronic musicians, damnit. Ciao gringos.

Sequencing Computer Peripherals

I just found a version of Bohemian Rhapsody performed by an Atari800XL, 8″ floppy drive, TI 99/4a, 3.5″ floppy drive and four HP ScanJets. It’s apparently the hottest youtube-clip in Canada right now, yip yip! The same author also has Funkytown performed by C64/modem/printer and TI99/4a. Mentioned as his inspiration is James Houston’s Big Ideas (Don’t Get Any) which had a slow start of its Internet career, but has received lots of internet attention by now. It’s James’ final project for design school, so the visual aspect is also well worked through. A very special clip. It’s a ZX Spectrum with scanners, harddrives, and printers that performs a Radiohead-cover. James “placed them in a situation where they’re trying their best to do something that they’re not exactly designed to do, and not quite getting there”.

While many chipmusicians claim to re-purpose technology, sequencing computer peripherals like this doesn’t even involve a sound chip! The first time I came across it was on the Commodore 64, where software would play music with the drive header. There is a youtube example of the 1541 drive playing Bicycle Ride For Two (originally from the first “chipmusic” record Music For Mathematics, 1962). There is also atleast one application to do this: 1541-music (1987), but don’t test it if your diskdrive is dear to you.

Back in the days, computers did not have a DAC (digital-to-analogue converters) which turn bytes into vibrations for loudspeakers. There is a peculiar story from 1966, when Tanzanian visitors to Sweden were treated with a printer playing their national anthem! Supposedly, this was the easiest way to make computer music for these engineers, although there was squarewave music elsewhere in Sweden at the time (where some pretty hardcore arpeggios were eventually made).

At the time, keyboards and screens were not common place either. Even in 1975 the Altair 8800 was just a box with switches and lights. The American hobbyist Erik Klein bought this computer as a kit and “30 hours later it was running with only one bug in the memory!” He happened to notice that the Altair was interfering with the nearby AM-radio, and he figured out how to control the tones and play his own music – “with nary a glitch“. Possibly this is the first piece of computer music made outside academia/art/videogames. But, the sounds are not digital and an AM-radio is not really a computer peripheral anyway.

On another (ir)relevant note, peripherals have been re-purposed in the C64 demoscene. If you run out of memory or CPU-power on your Commodore 64, you can use the 2 KB RAM and 6502 CPU inside the 1541. One example is the demo Deus Ex Machina (C64 2000) by Crest. Jeff’s song “Crossbow” apparently plays from the diskdrive.

So, the lesson to learn is that computer peripherals can be great tourist attractions and can probably be used for even more bizarre things. I’ll finish off this post with some more examples of music with peripherals.

Composing:

• Paul Slocum and his dot matrix synth, used for exhibitions and the excellent music project Tree Wave.
• Sue Harding’s Dot Matrix music. youtube. Does not involve any programming, but rather trial and error style by printing images and see how they sound. Notice the Amigas!
• Little-scale has a number of printer projects and an arduino tutorial aswell.
• Half Arsed Printar Shreddage at youtube. Feeding samples into a dot matrix printer head.
• Gijs Gieskes’ Image Scanning Sequencer
• Amiga-drive performing El Condor Pasa (stepmotor) youtube
• Amiga-drive performing a melody (”spinmotor”) youtube
• Amiga-drive playing a sample. youtube

Software:

• Tape Composer (C64 2009) Compose music for the Datasette (the “tape deck”). It plays back either through the motor, or through audio tape decks (the music you make is saved as data that sounds like your music, uh when you play it as audio) more info here. When I tried it I didn’t get much sound out of my datasette.
• Tap Music Composer (ZX Spectrum 2007) I forgot how this works, but the results sound like data-cassettes in the right tones.

Children with Chips taking over after Children of the Chip

I remember reading a thread on some Amiga forum a while back, about a dad who got his kid a Commodore 128 (or something similar). The datadaddy was surprised by how engaged his son got with the old computer. The Playstation and PC next to it were turned off. The C128 obviously had something that the newer machines were missing. Possibly it was just a temporary fascination, but it was definitely more than nostalgia or sarcasm, or gaming. When this kid and his friends were confronted with BASIC (the built-in operative system of the C128), they started exploring the possibilities of the computer. This was just something completely different than ultra-immersive blabla-technology. I think this is a very relevant idea, one that right now is explored by the Playpower project: 8-bit technology has unique possibilities!

Sure, these old systems are not “user-friendly” and its programming abilities might not attract people that are not into tech-logics. But in the 1980s, thousands of children/teenagers had the priviledge to explore ground-breaking machinery to learn how a computer (not an operative system) works. Ever since, computers have been debugged, standardized, normalized, controlled, patented, censored, etcetera. To most people this constitutes progress, but that is of course a politically and culturally biased statement. There is nothing limited about 8-bit technology per se. It’s still amazing technology for children or some people in non-computerized areas. And of course to those people who like working close to the machine without wearing a corporate condom.

I just realized that there are in fact three exhibitions that independent from eachother, concerns children and 8-bits. BliepBliep! is a “hands-on exhibition for the whole family” in Rotterdam (nl), running until September. Its theme is the sounds of computers and videogames, and apparently gives you some kinds of composing possibilities aswell.

ComputerMusic4Kids was made by Marieke Verbiesen who is an artist, researcher, teacher, and one part in VideoHomeTraining. Here you have a custom built matrix step sequencer where you can organize sampled sounds from a specific machine. There are 11 machines to choose from, from 1972’s Odyssey to 1989’s Gameboy. I actually tried an early version of this, and I think it’s something that kids definitely would get into. And grown ups like me, too. ComputerMusic4Kids is currently not on display anywhere, but watch out!

21st century retro-futurists is part of Art Venture, an exhibition in Roanoke (us). It was curated by Jeremy Kolosine who is most known for getting the 8-bit Operators together, but is also one of the most experienced composers doing 8-bit music today. This exhibition aims at getting people involved in making music and video with 8-bit technology and circuit bent objects. There are both workshops and installations, so this definitely seems like one of the more ambitious chip style things that have been executed in the art world. Any other suggestions?