Chipmusic is about accepting the system’s features (aka limitations), and expanding them (aka breaking them). 30 years of new sounds shows how a culture can progress through software and not hardware updates. Competition and community, trial and error & rationalism has contributed to it. But it presupposes that you are allowed to do what you want with the technology.

The C64 iPhone emulator was released in September as the first multi-purpose emulator on the iPhone. But Apple does not allow users to run downloadable code on the iPhone. Apple wants to retain control over what software is running on the iPhone (avoidable by jailbreaking and e.g. cydia). But since the C64 has a built-in BASIC programming language, Apple cannot stay in control. So the solution was to remove BASIC from the emulator, and offer a selection of something like 5 games. In that way, users cannot make their own software and they cannot load whatever software they want. This is the complete opposite to the hippie-libertarian-multimedia ‘coolness’ that has been around Apple since the 1970s. You know, Bill Gates writes a letter in 1976 to promote software copyright and ever since Apple has been cool and Microsoft evil…?

Whatever. But the iPhone C64-emulator transforms the C64-system into a restricted gaming console (but, but). Surely, 8-bit computers are often described as gaming computers. Indeed, they were developed (also) for gaming purposes, and not colourless and soundless business purposes. But they were not read-only and interpassive like consoles, so they should not be remembered, emulated and discussed as such. It is (even) harder to talk about intented uses of computers compared to e.g. Gameboy and NES, in that sense. Ie, there is nothing necessarily subversive about making your own music and software on a C64, even if chipmusic is often described in that way.

While the iPhone C64-emulator is just a piece of entertainment software, it plays part in a larger tendency to reduce old technology to something simplistic, something limited. But limited in what sense, and according to who? I can turn on my C64 and start programming in 1 second, and make music in 1 minute. I can easily have it fixed when it’s broken, or atleast understand what the problem is. I have access to 25 years of software and knowledge, and with a lack of commercial interests I do not have to consider intellectual property regulations. I don’t find 3 channels of sound to be limiting; I think it’s empowering. Of course, digital technology is improving in many quantitative and qualitative ways, enabling users to do more, and faster. But it is not a one-dimensional line of neutral progress – it is change, resulting from economic, cultural, social, and aesthetical values. New technology is not better per se. Even if it is, it doesn’t mean that new ideas require new technology. That modernist idea has been questioned in so many other fields, but is painfully present in digital media.

Oh well. So… here is some of little-scale’s soundchip-related iPhone apps! (Btw, does anyone know how the emulator can be sold, being based on the GPL-licensed Frodo?)

aSCIIaRENA has been announced by Up Rough and Divine Stylerz. Now you can easily watch fresh Amiga ASCII online, the way it was supposed to look, and hang out with elite ASCII boyz and girls. The site has some of the usual “social media” features such as a wall, forums, private messaging, voting, up/downloads. But those features are derived from old BBS-culture and not the Internet per se.

BBSs were extensively used already in the 1980s, and formed the backbone that allowed the cracker- and demoscene to blossom as somewhat isolated phenomena. Since a BBS is text-based, designers had to work with the default text characters that were sent over the phone lines. ASCII-artists designed graphics and logotypes in a graffiti-like style, quite different from current naive ASCII art online, the net.art ASCII-style of the 1990s, or earlier attempts of text art in the 1920s or 1860s.

ASCII artists release collections of their work (ASCII collys) and it’s these collys that are indexed at aSCIIaRENA. I think that almost all of it looks great, but I have a very soft spot for Amiga ASCII. I ran a small and shitty BBS in the mid 1990s (google-one-hit-wonder, almost), and called local boards with my 2400 baud modem. If you want read more on text art, check this post.

]]> http://chipflip.wordpress.com/2009/11/25/asciiarena-new-site-for-scene-ascii/feed/ 2 chipflip http://chipflip.wordpress.com/2009/11/24/chipdisco-dj-tool-out-now/ http://chipflip.wordpress.com/2009/11/24/chipdisco-dj-tool-out-now/#comments Tue, 24 Nov 2009 17:51:22 +0000 chipflip http://chipflip.wordpress.com/?p=835 ]]>

PortaMod by Syphus, mentioned earlier, is now announced for the public here! It’s a new player for older music formats, which offers alot more than performing/visualizing recorded music. It’s basically a library for Processing to play MOD/XM/S3M, currently presented in a few different forms, for example the Chipdisco. It offers two decks for DJ-action, and is also a great way to perform your own music live. You can tranpose songs, tempo changes, automatic beatmatch, loop quarters of patterns and jump inbetween them, mute individual channels. And you can use either keyboard, mouse, or MIDI. Chipdisco also allows you to navigate through songs with the cursor keys. Left/right changes the song position in the pattern list, while up/down goes a step up or down in the current pattern playing.

The source will be shared, so it will be interesting to see what the future holds for MOD/XM/S3M performances/visualizers in Processing. (For those using Supercollider, you can use Fredrik Olofsson’s redMOD and redXM here.)

There’s two chipmusic festivals in the Americas coming up soon. Tomorrow already, there is a festival called FILE Hypersonica 8 Bit Gaming People (or something like that)  in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil). Performing artists: Bit Shifter, Covox, Random, Bubblyfish, Sabrepulse, Henry Homesweet, Notendo and Pulselooper. The event is part of a larger festival of electronic arts with research presentations and art works. For example, Machiko Kusahara will talk about device art, which she describes as an interesting alternative to the Western idea that media art should be serious, (capitalist) critical, and centered around authors and original works. In Japan art, commodities and play is more intertwined. That also seems to relate to my previous ideas about the absence of “critical” uses of the NES soundchip in Japan.

In December, Blip Festival returns to New York after its appearance in Aalborg a few months ago. This is the largest chipmusic festival known to human animals, and there are about 30 artists announced so far. The list includes for example little-scale, David Sugar, Trash Can Man, the J. Arthur Keenes Band, Disasterpeace, Paris, C-Men, and Rosa Menkman. So, Blip offers another good line-up while still maintaining their principal of not repeating any non-US artists.

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.

There is an interview with Neil Baldwin at Original Sound Version. It’s a good interview and very well-researched, so check it out. Neil did his first game music for the NES in 1990 and hasn’t stopped since. He’s recently returned to chipmusic by describing all game music he’s made at his site, work on a new text-based NES music software to make full use of the NES (mentioned before), and he has produced some new music! Don’t miss his last one, Cleptoplank, full-force triple-speed NES-action literally beyond the chips.

Neil started on the C64 and there are interesting comparisons between C64 and NES. Neil says: “I think the most difficult aspect technically was coping with the different approach required for a ROM-based medium. All those self-modifying-code tricks that you could do on C64 were just not possible. As I’ve said before, we also lacked proper technical information, so it was very much trial and error. It’s not actually correct to say I used C64 drivers, but the NES ones were definitely modeled on the same token/sequence/track format that I (and most other people) used to use, which was probably invented by Rob Hubbard.”

He mentions his bottom-up way of composing. Ehm, that doesn’t sound right. What I mean is, while some composers write the composition before the code (like Hubbard wrote scores on paper that he transcribed into assembler), others find their way through the hardware/software and gradually come up with a song. Neil: “I never sat down and planned out a song as a traditional composer might. From that point-of-view, I was constantly messing around with the audio programming side, trying to invent new ways of making the NES sound different…”

On the question of favourite NES-composers, it’s interesting that Neil only refers to Western composers “(apart from the obvious Japanese guys)”. Not being a real NES-music freak I might be wrong, but I feel like there is a gap between Japanese and Western NES-music in the 1980s (ie, Europe & America). Musically it might be a bit of a stretch to say that Western composers were more oriented towards rock. (or..?) I’m talking more about the methods of production, about how you treated technology. It seems that Western composers wanted to stretch the limits of the soundchip, to break out of the system. For Japanese composers it was more important to stay within the systemand focus on composition rather than production, so to say. Respecting the materiality, like a guitar builder.

It would be interesting to hear your views on this. Surely there are exceptions. But it is weird that on the C64 it only took a few years until the experimenting got pretty hardcore, while on the NES it is difficult to find transgressive uses of the 2A03 in the 1980s. It cannot only be becase the NES is a console and the C64 was open for any freaks to explore, right? Why did Japan never have a something like a demoscene? The first homecomputer was Japanese (pictured). Were there any network hackers in Japan? Were the 8-bit computers not so popular since 8 bits could not include all the Japanese characters? So were computers predominantly expensive 16-bit business machines? Any answers would be very welcome. Meanwhile, I have another idea.

Western composers had been fostered in an individualistic culture where hacking and (personal) computers had to do with self-realization. Counterculture and commerce united in a Californian ideology that portrayed computers as tools for Freedom. I don’t know the history of hacking or creative computing in Asia, but it seems unlikely that such libertarian ideas would develop in more collectivistic culture such as Japan. Western thought has been pre-occupied for centuries with the idea of transcendence rather than immanence. You know – free will, independence, and objectivity is better than submerging into a group and a system of beliefs. That’s the individualistic system of belief. ;) It might be far-fetched, but I think that centuries of thought is bound to have some effect on how music is made, also with soundchips. Again, I don’t know enough about Japanese culture, but maybe it could be a sign of disrespect towards Nintendo to use the soundchip in any way you please. Maybe that is a property of your culture that you are not supposed to just ‘break’. For a hardcore individualist, that way of reasoning would be a sign of Japan’s Killer Collectivism (LOL).

And Neil, if you are reading this … I don’t know what to say. I am sorry I dragged you into this mess. :)

If we define Internet as a wild ecosystem of hyperlinks that fosters a collective intelligence built up by e.g. swarms of anonymous users and protocols that do not discriminate between different content, the Internet seems to be dying. It’s atleast changing in serious ways. Why?

If your IP-address does something naughty like distributing content that copyright owners or publishers want money for, the ISPs are obliged to reveal the “identity” behind the IP-address if they are asked (e.g. Sweden), or shut down your Internet access (e.g. France) — without evidence or trials, as suggested by EU’s IPRED. And recently in Sweden, a small ISP was demanded (by law) to shut down the Pirate Bay or pay 50,000 euros, due to copyright infringement that happened somewhere in their cables. So ISPs are responsible for what flows through their cables. Hm. Hello censor! And according to a recent boingboing-article, this style is about to go global thanks to ACTA.

Even if it’s bad enough that IP-addresses (e.g whoever uses your wireless connection) are policed by ISPs (concerned more with profits/survival than politics), it is even more alarming when such procedures can be automatized. Youtube and its ContentID analyzes the audio of videos and pays a part of ad revenues to copyright holders/publishers. IFPI’s ISRC embeds copyright information into audio. Similar systems are likely to be demanded for open networks to satisfy those in line with 4 bloated music corporations, like with the re-launch of Napster. As my favourite doctor of copyriot says, copyright control is no longer focused on works but on regulating the tools/media.

And how does all this relate to chipmusic? Well, chipmusic culture as I know it grew out of the will to copy. Early 1980s cracktros used chipmusic ripped from games. 1990s Amiga demoscene lived the ruined dreams of hiphop and sampled whatever music they wanted in its own network culture using mod-files, BBSs and postal mail. In the 2000s there is keygen-music and online there is hundreds of thousands of (copyrighted) chip-songs nicely indexed, free for download in its original format, ready to deconstruct or remix. That situation won’t come again if corporate protocols and codes permeat chipmusic just because e.g. ISRC seemed like a convenient way of making a few MP3-bucks. And remember, Internet politics is not some obscure matter for a separate digital world. It is probably already in your pocket. Bzzzz!

I recently had the pleasure of getting a sneak peak on Daniel Botz’s doctoral dissertation on the demoscene, entitled “Hacker-Ästhetik” (to be published). I am struggling with reading German, but I’m quite impressed with the extensive research that has gone into it. It has some refreshing views on the history, aesthetics and materiality of the demoscene. Before I got a peak of the dissertation, I was e-mailing back and forth with Botz during the summer. I thought I’d publish some of it here to see if it can lead to some interesting discussions. I am currently bathing in theory for my thesis on chipmusic, and I have been using some ideas from here. I’ve probably upset the radical post-humanist Friedrich Kittler by studying soundchips as social constructions pre-encoded with musical conventions, rather than mere ontological facts. But the idea of inherent aesthetical potentials in materials is refreshingly anti-individualistic.

Choose your youtube Amiga oldschool demo soundtrack: dr.vector or lizardking or tip&firefox or diablo.

CHIPFLIP > I have recently tried to get into the “media materialism” of Kittler and the others. In combination with software studies, or platform studies, I think it forms a very nice contextualization of demoscene works as political aesthetics. As I am more of a musician than a programmer/technology-nerd, I tend to focus more on the musical aspects though. With my restricted knowledge in Kittler’s works, I have understood that he sometimes regards technology as apriori, as something default. I saw you mentioning Kittler in relation to demoscene restrictions. Is that more about the artificial restrictions (4k intros, etc) than the actual hardware restrictions, or..?

BOTZ > To me, Kittlers “media materialism” is one of the key concepts for demoscene aesthetics. It’s not only applicable to specific size or platform restrictions but also to the common law of the demoscene to use accessible, standard customary hardware. Basically, the classic media artist asks himself “What kind of technology would I need to realize my concept”, while the demoscener asks “What can I achieve with the hardware in my hands”, which is regarding technology as a priori. What I basically try to say in my thesis is that demos rely on the artistic materiality of computers. Their aesthetic values are not based on infinite digital flexibility, but on the physical restrictions of computer platforms. That’s why demoscene is not about an idealistic projection of future technology, but about the creative appropriation of present hardware. Thus, it overcomes the frustration of “media platonism”, as Kittler would probably say.

CHIPFLIP > Do you see any problems in focusing on the demoscene’s “bricolage” characteristics? I have grown a sort of love-hate relationship with this perspective. Demos indeed do “impossible” things, but I sometimes find myself ignoring that this is almost like an inherent human trait. We all want to do the best with what we have, you know? Demosceners are reliant on the medium, but so is everybody else. There is no unlimited medium. I think the reason why I am particularly interested in this, is that chip music is often described as political/subversive/novelty/hacking/etc when it’s usually a lot more
conformative than that. Hm, I guess in the end my question to you is – what other subcultures/art-forms do you think are similar to the demoscene?

BOTZ > You asked for an example, I would name Graffiti as a paradigm of how creative subcultures work. I know that the comparison Cracker Scene – Graffiti Scene is really worn out because of the superficial similiarities like leaving traces in public space under illegal circumstances. But in both cases, the aim is to gain freedom, which is to be reached by expanding barriers, sometimes legal restrictions (as you wrote: demoscene began with claiming the right to copy), but at the cost of building up self-set restrictions. For example Graffiti claims the right to paint virtually any wall, it’s the call for freedom of artistic expression in the urban spaces. But the Graffiti Scene itself is far from being anarchistic: There are several traditional styles anyone has to master before getting fame and there is a very complex hierarchy of writers, plus an aerosol can is a VERY restrictive artistic tool.

CHIPFLIP > I have come to understand “art” as being very dependent on (a relationship to) concepts and theory, while “craft” is valued more as technical skills and end results. Thus, I personally regard the demos in general as craftmanship, but as I understand what you wrote you see it somewhere inbetween. In your text, you say that in the demoscene the computer is an artistic material, not a tool. What other artistic practices would you compare this to? Why did you choose the term artistic material?

BOTZ > This is quite simple. Computers are mostly referred to as tools. A tool is used to produce or shape something which in the end exists independently from the tool it was created with. In some cases the product even negates the production process and the use of a computer. Otherwise, a demo cannot exist without its platform, since the definition as a demo assumes its real-time execution on a computer, making a demo not a PRODUCT but a STATE of the computer. Thus, it’s more consistent to think of the computer as a material which is being shaped by its operator, pushing every byte into place. If you take this further, it’s pretty easy to realise that the aesthetic parameters of a demo are heavily dependent on the used hardware platform.

In other words: A demo is not a free concept being realised by the aid of a computer. It’s about the artistic process of interacting with the available material, accepting its boundaries as essential stimuli for shaping the outcome. This concept of “artistic material” is retraceable to Aristotle’s Physics (causa materialis): A statue made of bronze is already included within the possibilities of the material bronze. I like this point a lot, because computer art is often being read as completely virtual and unlimited while a demo makes use of the resistance of a certain hardware platform to define its aesthetic standards. Thus, the demoscene revaluates (not only so-called “obsolete”) computers as artistic material. (Kittler Inside! ;-)

So for now I will try to adress your question about the scene as a kind of craft. The applicability of the this term to the production culture of demos is something I really racked my brain over several times. On the one hand, the appreciation of technical skills, the mastering of formal exercises and the references to artistic traditions has made this comparison very tempting. It is also often used in the attempt to divide “craft” from “art”, which is very common in art history. See for example the title of Shirley Shor’s Article “DEMOing: An Emerging Artform or Just Another Digital Craft?“:

In fact, I use the same distinction as you do, keeping in mind that it’s pure theory and it does not works that simple in real life. Plus, it only works for “western” culture since the 15th century, and it has been dynamised by the avantgardes of the 20th century, which means that performing yesterday’s art equals today’s craft. So, placing democoding somewhere between art and craft is not really something I would dare because both terms are very interdependant and judgmental. But there’s no doubt that the scene really behaves like a craft guild sometimes. I used the term “craftmanship” for the graphics scene, as there has been a long dispute about quality standards, like “pixel art should be judged by pixels skills alone”. I just don’t believe that strict opinions like that have any connection to forms of traditional craft. I think it’s a comprehension of form which serves to constitute the scene as a subculture. In other words, not the SCENE made the RULES, the RULES made the SCENE :)

CHIPFLIP > That’s really interesting. Yeah, I have recently tried to differentiate between demoscene-music and the chipmusic that is released on (net)labels, micromusic.net, 8bitcollective, etc. There are surprisingly few demosceners that release/perform their music elsewhere, which is a curious thing in itself. But also, there seems to be more focus on craft in the demoscene, than elsewhere. Demoscene chipmusic is more technical, while other chipmusic is more about the musical concept or form. Obviously this relates to what you are saying; demomusic rules on small filesize and maximalism. Related to this then, is also that demosceners tend to aim for new or spectacular results, whereas other chipmusicians can embrace the default sounds to a larger extent. Here it is often more important to make the Gameboy-reference clear – especially if you’re not using a Gameboy :D

BOTZ > That’s correct! German Author Ulf Poschardt wrote in his book “DJ Culture” about “Celebrating the means of production”, which claims that for example in hip hop or techno culture musical products are never presented as isolated works of art but constantly referring to their basis of creation. Also, I enjoyed recently reading your (chipflip-)comment on “Fanta in Space”. Insane chip hacking of the C-64 hardware to play an italo disco track is a very good example how demoscene craft works. I think, Fanta managed to pick a musical style pattern which can be instantly associated with demoscene music, some sort of tight lizardking-ish tracker-pop. It’s the same when Spacepigs introduced their Spacetracker on the IBM PC using the worn out first samples of the Amiga ST-01. It seems to me that inside the scene, technical innovations have to be tested by mastering canonical exercises before they can be used for artistic experiments.

There’s been another discussion at 8bc about what chipmusic is. It seems to me that there are more people talking about genre than technodeterminism compared to a few years ago. There are thoughts about what building blocks make it sound chip (Sound chip here means: proper chipstyle, sounding-like chipstyle, soundchip). That could be due to the new perspectives that come with non-techno-purism. If you don’t use soundchips and trackers you need to be aware about what you’re doing in order to make it sound chip. When you’re using soundchips and trackers, you don’t have to worry about those things. (form vs medium)

It is interesting, because the technodeterminst view has tended to build this defensive discourse during the 2000s. “If you make chipmusic that’s not coming from a soundchip, we don’t want you around here boy!”. In the 90s it was about filesize instead, because a lot (if not most) chipmusic in the 1990s was sample-based on Amiga or PC. But still, if we say that the Paula chip of the Amiga is a soundchip, it is possible to stick with the soundchip-determinst definition of chipmusic. (A bit like pretending that the Gameboy has a soundchip)

Anything made with the internal sounds of the Amiga then, is chipmusic, e.g. Amigacore, Osdorp Posse, Bruno. Which finally brings us to the reason of this post. Up Rough has posted mastered MP3-versions of four Amiga MOD-classics by Mortimer Twang (Lukas Nystrand): Agima Blues (515kb), All Times by Music (588kb), Burning Chrome (350kb), Moonmaster (390kb). Calling this chipmusic is a bit useless, because the music form is quite far from quantized geek bleep museek. This has more to do with hip hop, jazz, and drum n’ bass. If you put Mortimer’s music into a mix, you no longer have to put your brain into tracker-data-analysis-mode when you hear it. Just listen to the music. Sometimes music is just music, nowhaddayouknow.

The J. Arthur Keenes Band is a Canadian artist who has been lurking around in the outskirts of the chipmusic scene for a couple of years, without gaining the recognition I think he deserves. Maybe his new release Pamplemousse on the excellent Pause will change that. It is a great proof of the genre-breaching potentials of soundchips (pop, rock, reggae?) but Keenes also uses a wider array of instruments: Gameboy, vocals, guitar, organ, melodica, etc. It’s a juicy result that shows off strong skills for harmonies and arrangements. Chip pop at its best!

Oddly enough I found myself in a discussion about pamplemousse (the fruit) last weekend in Caen, France. I was told it was not a grape fruit, and not a blood orange. And now I understand. It is an MP3-release!