Soundchip-Musik 1977-1994

It’s out - the most comprehensive text about chipmusic I have read!

Nils Dittbrenner: Soundchip-Musik - Computer- und Videospielmusik von 1977-1994. Buy it here, read some here. You will notice it is only available in German and even if I keep brushing and brushing, the dust of my German skills won’t come off. But I will try to give you a very brief and general idea of the book.

1) Technology. It has in-depth explanations of the soundchips from Stella / TIA (Atari VCS) through to the early General MIDI chips. This covers roughly half of the book.

2) Musicology. Discusses composers’ ideas and tricks with composing on the soundchips. The technical limitations are defined as: polyphony, timbre, storage, CPU and other external restrictions. Some tricks discussed are the combination of bass and drums on one single channel, using arpeggios instead of chords, pulse width LFOs and samples. Dittbrenner also approaches some dilemmas of chipmusic: incompatibility problems when converting game music, the music in games having less priority than graphics and code, and the tempo-problems coming out of NTSC/PAL-sync.

3) Sociology. Like the book title implies, the focus is on computer- and videogames but there are also discussions about the demoscene and chipmusic in pop culture, etc. As for genres, Dittbrenner seems to focus on Micromusic and Chiptunes. This passage is hard for me to understand, but it seems like the making of genres is more about social than musical factors.

Ok, that’s the introduction. This book is quite a piece of work, and it’s very frustrating to not understand it. So please buy the book and translate it for me :-)

Chipmusic Movies

I recently got to see the French chipmusic documentary 8 Bit Generation, which premiered at Blip Festival 2007. Compared to 8 Bit, shown at the previous Blip Festival, this is more focused on the European chipmusic scene’s place in popular music culture, whereas 8 Bit had an American focus and discussed chipmusic more in relation to art and the future. In 8 Bit Generation you can hear a lot from Malcolm McLaren, who was quite into chipmusic a few years ago - when this documentary was essentially filmed. I will get back with more proper reviews when I can see 8 Bit again.

Reformat the Planet is movie documentary to be released soon by 2 Player Productiuons. Based on the Blip Festival 2006, it is “using New York as a microcosm for a larger global movement” and seems to focus on Nintendo products and videogames. update feb09: after seeing a private screener, the narrow focus on New York and Gameboy/NES feels a bit annoying (even ignorant?). But the inclusion of visual artists and interesting discussions about videogame nostalgia and commercialism in the second half, lifts the documentary.

The 8bit Philosophy is another upcoming documentary with an online trailer. It seems to be aimed at C64-gamers and people that enjoy remixes of C64 game songs, so I would expect less philosophy than history, really.Does anyone know of more chipmusic documentaries around?