A Tracker From the 1960s?

 

Lejaren Hiller was one of the first people to generate music with a computer. He was doing it already in the 1950s, just like for example Douglas Bolitho and Martin Klein (info).

The picture above though, shows something else. It’s a dot matrix print-out with instructions for how to operate the volume and EQ knobs on your hi-fi system while playing the record “Program (Knobs) for the Listener”, released in 1970.

While others would surely salivate over the random (?) numbers and the interaction/remixism that this presents, I’m more interested in seeing it as a tracker. A primitive tracker, but nevertheless:

• It’s a text-mode list of instructions that runs vertically.
• There are discrete steps fixed in time and all the instructions are locked to these steps, like a soundtracker.
• The instructions are not absolute, but relative to whatever sound is coming from “under the hood” like a hypertracker.
• It’s divided into tracks, and the tracks affect eachother just like they do on many old soundchips.

Sure, you could see this as an analogue step sequencer, combined with the ideas of John Cage (who Hiller worked with). It’s only the print out that makes it seem like a tracker. Makes sense. But then again, it is the level of interface that is the most defining part of trackers. Trackers could use analogue synthesis and generative features. They just never do. :–)

Btw – some people claim that Lejaren Hiller did the first computer music, but that is not true. In Australia and the UK people made computer compositions and audio as early as 1951. See here.

But could we say that this is the first example of a tracker interface? Yeah, of course we can. This is Chipflip, where dreams come true. So who’s up for the challenge of finding something older that looks like a tracker? I’m sure it exists, right?

Soundtrackers, Hypertrackers and Acidtrackers

tl;dr – There are two kinds of trackers: soundtrackers and hypertrackers. But it’s a combination of them that is showing the way forward. And perhaps the micro-efficient trackers are more useful than ever, with the popularity of handheld devices.

When I wrote my thesis I had some difficulties to cover the topic of trackers. Although they are old and popular programs, there’s not much scholarly research on them. I can’t remember anyone trying to categorize trackers properly, for example. If you know of any such attempts, please get in touch.

For my thesis, I ended up talking about soundtrackers and hypersequencers. They refer to two dominant families of chipmusic trackers. Soundtrackers use sampled sounds and have a user-friendly interface. Hypersequencers are more about synthetic sounds and efficiency.

I find these two categories quite useful for discussing trackers in general. But I have also found that talking about trackers as hypersequencers (originally from Phelps) doesn’t feel quite right. Instead, I suggest the term hypertracker.*

So:

Soundtrackers are similar to sheet music, because they display notes and effects next to eachother. You can see which note is played, and also its ornamentation (vibrato, arpeggio, etc). The song is arranged in patterns, and one pattern includes one bar of all the voices. That means that all voices are locked to the same tempo, and the same arrangement structure.

Hypertrackers use more of a code logic. If soundtrackers are like sheet music with absolute values, hypersequenced music is like code that executes instructions. The note C might play a completely different note, depending on what kind of code is next to it. It enables a wild and “generative” composing style. Voices can have different tempos and sounds can be connected to eachother in a modular fashion. Hypersequenced music requires few resources (in terms of RAM, ROM, CPU) and mostly use synthetic sounds. They are “hyper” because they are referential; a letter or number usually refers to something other than itself.

Personally I find soundtrackers very convenient to use. They are straight-forward, simple and direct. Hypertrackers on the other hand, are more versatile and offer more surprises. They have more character somehow, and can lead the music in directions that the composer wasn’t aware of. Hypertrackers offer a lot of control and yet, as a composer, you can choose to hand some of that control back to the software. In soundtrackers it’s more up to the composer to take command.

Plenty of chip software doesn’t fit into these two categories. LSDj is an interesting example, since it takes inspiration from both. Obviously Mr. Kotlinski prefers hypertrackers. He even expanded the hyper-structure by adding more layers to the song arrangement, and by adding more tables. But just like one of his big sources of inspiration (MusicLine) it also incorporates some of the UI-ideas from soundtrackers. For example, you can set absolute effects next to the notes, such as pitchbend or vibrato.

This mixture of sound- and hypertracker became very popular in the chipscene. LSDj inspired LittleGPTracker, and created a new momentum. One example is Pulsar, recently created by Neil Baldwin who made 8-bit game music already in the 80′s. Even more recently, I’ve seen previews of new demoscene software that is highly inspired by LGPT.

These programs are not made for keyboards. They are designed for handheld consoles and very few buttons. Another difference from other trackers is that they can be used for live performances. Most trackers are pretty useless for live improvisations, unfortunately. A third difference: they can maximize the hardware. Trackers are normally designed to leave resources for code and graphics of demos and games, but this new generation allows you to use nearly 100% of the available resources. That is a fundamental difference, which is why chipscene Gameboy music can be more powerful than game/demo music for Gameboy.

The chipscene made chipmusic stand on its own feet, independently from the visuals, and that has affected the software too. New conventions have been developed, and it seems like future chiptrackers will follow this new path inbetween sound- and hypertrackers. It might also be used for other platforms with few buttons or low memory. Arduino and Raspberry Pi come to mind, aswell as smartphones with their complete lack of buttons.

In those situations I’d guess that “tracker” is a precise enough term. Just like  Renoise is a tracker, in a world of piano rollerz. But if there should be a new term for it, I suggest acidtrackers.

* I agree with HVMEC that trackers and editors are not the same thing. Trackers are step sequencers, while editors require the user to set the duration of each note (more here). The term hypertracker excludes programs like Soundmonitor or Future Composer, because they are editors. On the other hand, I think those kinds of programs are rare today. And perhaps they share more with MCK/MML or piano roll sequencers, than with trackers?

After the Trackers: John Cage Bukkake

Trackers have remediated plenty of Western ideas of music. Typical time signatures (4/4) and tonality (12-TET) are the most obvious. Less apparent is the distinct separation between instruments and notation; sound and code. Most trackers force the users to make strictly defined instruments which sound basically the same every time it’s triggered. As such, trackers are essentially the opposite to modular synthesis, where anything can modulate anything (ideally).

Perhaps that’s why trackers never seem to go mainstream. They are too deterministic and controlling. Too manual. The contemporary way is to have fun with stuff you can’t understand: nothing is a mistake á la Cage. It’s okay too be lazy, 2 cool 4 skool. So trackers like Renoise are going that way too, and seems to be getting pretty bloated in the process.

In a similar way, some of the most talked-about chipmusic tools are not trackers. New physical interfaces like Gatari and C64 keytar are obvious examples, but sometimes software also gets some attention. Nanoloop, of course, can be seen as a precursor to the now popular grid interfaces. Viznut’s Ibniz is more of a mathematics tool, but it got a lot of attention earlier this year. It’s been designed to make text-based generative works with a tiny filesize (sometimes called ?bytebeat). Since Ibniz works with both visuals and sounds, it also blurs the boundaries between visual interface and content, like little-scale also demonstrated a few days ago.

For me it seems clear that visuals and music will melt together in new forms of interfaces in the future. Let’s look at two experiments that can give some pointers for the future of low-tekk composing: Gijs Gieskes’ TVCV-sequencer and Chantal Goret’s mouse-controlled Crazy Box!

Taketracker Mystery Solved?

In a previous post we saw that Taketracker was listed as the second most popular Amiga tracker, which was odd since it’s an obscure DOS-software. According to Redneckerz it was the most powerful 16-channel-tracker that used the MOD format.

I looked into it a bit more. According to Stone Oakvalley, the SOAMC collection used Deliplayer 2 to identify the music format. Other programs identify these “Taketracker-songs” as either Sound-, Noise- or Protracker. Below you can see Stone’s screenshots.

There are TT-songs in SOAMC that were made by Maktone, Dubmood, Zalza, Josss, Zabutom, Nagz and Cerror. Atleast some of their songs are made in Fasttracker II, saved as MOD. Also, if an FT2-songs are loaded into Protracker and saved again, they are still identified as Taketracker (according to Deetsay aka Tero).

On the other hand, Beathawk’s ambient-tune says in the sample-info “hopefully ucan play this right with pc”. Rez says that his TT-songs were made with Protracker 3.52. And if you search the TT-songs’ sample-infos for “amiga” you can find more songs that were definitely made on the Amiga. There are songs by Allister Brimble and Moby, but also those pioneerings works by 4-mat around 1990 (which were made in Protracker 1.3b).

The header of a MOD file only seems to have rough details about which tracker was used. Afaik, there’s no way to know for sure which tracker was used to make the songs. But there are obviously different ways to go, since the TT-songs are identified so differently by various software.

Stone decided to relabel all the TT-songs as Protracker. You can see a list of all the the conversions here. Hopefully someday there’ll be a proper MOD-identifier around. Until then, the Taketracker mystery is not solved!

The Most Popular Tracker Ever?

Stone Oakvalley had his Amiga 1200 playing for one year, 24 hours a day, to make the largest MP3-compilation of Amiga music. 255 000 songs and 200 days of listening. The info page shows 194 different formats, and I wanted a list of the most popular ones (amount of songs per format, rounded off).

• Protracker – 77 200
• Taketracker – 6300 [wrong - see update]
• Noisetracker – 5800
• MED – 3500 + 700 in OctaMED
• Sierra AGI – 1800
• Soundtracker – 1400 + 300 in Ultimate Soundtracker

Just below 1000 we can find MusicLine, Startrekker, TFMX, Sonix, AHX and custom players. The synthetic trackers (SIDmon, Art of Noise, DigiBooster, Sonic Arranger, SoundMon, Future Composer) are all less popular. There are several noteworthy ones that I haven’t even heard about: The Player, SoundFX and MusicDiskTracker for example. Maybe worth checking out?

The high amount of Sierra AGI-songs, is probably caused by jingles and sound effects being interpreted as songs. Or is there a subculture of Sierra ravers that I don’t know about? Also – what is Taketracker? It seems to be an obscure MS DOS-tracker from 1994, but there are over 6000 songs made in it here. Is it because 4-channel Fasttracker songs were converted to Taketracker, which was Amiga-compatible?

[update: Stone used Deliplayer 2 to detect the format of the music. The songs that DP2 detects as TakeTracker are identified as as Soundtracker, Noisetracker or Protracker by other software (Eagleplayer, Delitracker, Aplayer, Hippoplayer, Noiseconverter & ExoticRipper), as Stone showed me. With artists like Maktone, Josss, Dubmood, Zabutom, Zalza, Cerror, it's likely a PC-tracker]

As Stone suggested in an e-mail, it’s probably a specific version of a Pro/Noise/Soundtracker that is misinterpreted]

Although Soundtracker was developed (hacked) for 3 years, there are only 1700 songs. Perhaps it is because 1) people did not use the mod-format but rather the song-format (which did not include the samples), 2) the files have been re-interpreted as Noisetracker/Protracker, or 3) the music was poorly archived.

Or perhaps the home computer music revolution only got started with Noisetracker and MED in 1989? Both these programs were developed until 1991 (when MED became OctaMED). But in 1990 Protracker appeared (as a Noisetracker-hack) and became the new standard.

With almost 80 000 songs, Protracker is more popular than the PC’s Fasttracker, Screamtracker and Impulse-tracker combined (source). Did any other music software leave such a massive amount of non-recorded songs? On the C64, we can use SIDId to see that no program was used for more than 10 000 songs (scroll down here). I suppose those numbers don’t include sub-songs though.

Anyway. Protracker – the most popular tracker ever? Also, is it the most popular 8-bit tracker in terms of vinyl releases? In the timeline there are 100+ vinyls made on Amiga, most likely in Protracker or MED. Protracker was very popular in the-stuff-that-became-known-as-breakcore on labels like Bloody Fist, Digital Hardcore and Fischkopf.

Btw – check this great diagram on the history of trackers. Useful++

Octamed Jungle with Mulder

Do you remember the 1990s big beat and Fatboy Slim’s Rockafeller Skank? Well, one of the official remixes was made on Amiga by Mulder, and here’s a video of it running in Octamed! (the released version used an external sampler though) What I find fascinating with these clips is that the jungle I listened to as a teenager could very well have been made on Amiga. Sure, a lot of Protracker demoscene music was good enough to be released on record. But it wasn’t. And the world of records was something completely different. Maybe it’s a bit like realizing that Michael Jackson was making his music on a Sega. C:

Mulder also recently put online the drumtrack of Amazon II – Booya (Open Your Mind), which was synchronized by click-track to a second Amiga running the rest of the audio. Amazon II consisted of Tony B and Aphrodite, who also made music as Urban Shakedown that also released records with Amiga jungle.

This is perhaps irrelevant for what we call chipmusic today. Aesthetically and culturally, it surely is. (I really like jungle though). But technically, it uses the same Amiga “soundchip” that 4-mat and the others utilized to make the sample-based music that was chipmusic in the 1990s. I’ve touched on this semi-absurdity before and by including Osdorp Posse in the timeline. Selecta.

Chipmusic DJing: Syphus’ Audiovisual MOD DJ software

The British chipmusician Syphus is a schooled composer who has been active in the Amiga demoscene for ages, written his dissertation on chip music and how its formats have survived the age of MP3-recoded music. Now he’s developing a DJ-tool for Amiga MOD-files, where instruments and sequence data is individually accessible. Recorded music enables very limited manipulation of the music but with the MOD-format you can change potentially every aspect of a song; tones and scales, rhythms, volumes, arrangement, etc. This is an old dream of mine coming true; an untapped potential of well-archived and “open source” chipmusic.

Syphus is also experimenting with the music as visual cues, making real-time visual synchronization with the MOD-files. He is presenting a first version of the project today at Dorkbot Newcastle. I have tried it out and it is very promising. Coded in the Java-based Processing, it’s possible to run it even on the web (but not on Amiga). He’s also planning on releasing the source code, if I’ve understood correctly.

I am not sure if there are other tools like this around, which is perhaps a bit surprising. Maybe it’s because you can’t play two songs simultaneously on one machine, forcing you to use blasphemous platforms that miss the 8-bit spirituality that chip-fundamentalists crave for. There is Gwem’s STj which is great to make DJ-sets on two Ataris, but afaik it doesn’t feature any music-manipulating functions.