Endless loop: A brief history of chiptunes

Written by

Peter Swimm

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Chiptune refers to a collection of related music production and performance practices sharing a history with video game soundtracks. The evolution of early chiptune music tells an alternate narrative about the hardware, software, and social practices of personal computing in the 1980s and 1990s. By digging into the interviews, text files, and dispersed ephemera that have made their way to the Web, we identify some of the common folk-historical threads among the commercial, noncommercial, and ambiguously commercial producers of chiptunes with an eye toward the present-day confusion surrounding the term chiptune. Using the language of affordances and constraints, we hope to avoid a technocratic view of the inventive and creative but nevertheless highly technical process of creating music on computer game hardware.

Full Paper.

Im sure the Pulpit will raise some objections to the authors conclusions, but it is worth the read.

Comments

8 responses to “Endless loop: A brief history of chiptunes”

  1. Kurt

    “The artists of the Game Boy generation may be the last for whom chiptunes can hold a nostalgic appeal.” Well, kids who never even played an 8bit or even a 16bit console are making ‘chiptunes’… but anyway, i enjoyed the reading, good examples of music.

  2. Hexagram

    See — to me the dalliance in retro fetishism is more bands like the Advantage and the NESkimos who cover video game music, or places like Overclocked Remix. These media are completely born within video games, whereas someone like Random or gwEm is someone whose original compositions sit completely outside video games.

    That said, when the Game Boy powers up and emits its trademark chirp noise, the crowds do go wild.. maybe it’s just wishful thinking on my part. The paper does make a good point about the cultural weight of the artifacts used in live performance.

    Ethan

  3. Peter Swimm

    Yea but hopefully they will be viewing it as another art form, rather than a dalliance in retro fetishism.

  4. Random

    Failed with the first sentence :(

  5. Random

    …but it actually looks like a nice piece of work. I’ll have to read through all of it, after I’ve had some rest.

  6. Johan

    Academia is bound to fail

  7. Peter Swimm

    I think the main problem, as far as academic papers go, that if you are required to cite alot of sources, you will have to rely on all those years of poorly researched articles…

    Ahh publishing…

  8. Akira||8GB

    Agreed with Random. Failed from first sentence.

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