Chiptunes ...?

[lazygecko]

9 hours ago, Meteo Xavier said:

How do you demake an NES song? What else can you strip out from there?

Or maybe I'm mixing up the syntax again...

We have to go deeper. 1-Bit single channel chiptunes.

[Overkillius]

Haha I wish I had seen this thread a few days ago before I submitted my chiptune to the site. Still I really like pure chiptune, but I guess if my chiptune gets rejected two years from now I'll load it up again and give it some panning and maybe even some subtle eq and compression if appropriate.

 

This was a good read.

 

On 7/30/2016 at 8:46 AM, lazygecko said:

We have to go deeper. 1-Bit single channel chiptunes.

If you say so. Now I'm determined to make a single channel Beepola arrangement get through

[RushJet1]

https://www.dropbox.com/s/wtwyug5gp14j2zi/butterbuilding_tri.mp3?dl=0

I did not make this; it was on the FamiTracker forums. It is a single channel with one bit volume control and manages to sound great. 

[Gario]

2 hours ago, Overkillius said:

Haha I wish I had seen this thread a few days ago before I submitted my chiptune to the site. Still I really like pure chiptune, but I guess if my chiptune gets rejected two years from now I'll load it up again and give it some panning and maybe even some subtle eq and compression if appropriate.

 

This was a good read.

To be fair, there is chiptune from Rushjet1 that was just posted on the site. I personally am hoping to find more being submit in the near future as a result - I've always been in favor of solid chiptune (hell, even pure NES two rec / triangle / PCM / noise chiptunes) to be posted on the site. It does need to be pretty solid in it's own right, though - I look forward to hearing it soon

[jmr]

Whoa. Happy to see an authentic chip track with next to no post production on the site. Congrats RushJet1! 

[Tex]

23 hours ago, RushJet1 said:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/wtwyug5gp14j2zi/butterbuilding_tri.mp3?dl=0

I did not make this; it was on the FamiTracker forums. It is a single channel with one bit volume control and manages to sound great. 

I think this sort of stuff fits well with fast-paced music in particular. It gives the illusion that more than one channel is being used.

 

[lazygecko]

 

[Yosh1PrisMa]

I would like to ask you a question that maybe your central nervous system explodes... maybe I'm digressing but I want to know your opinion 

[it is time to philosophize With Yosh1PrisMa]

What if the music of 8-bit or normally called Chiptune that does not exist?

in my personal opinion (It is not a criticism) ... what would happen in terms of game we would jump to the fifth generation which seems a temporal paradox, but really if there were no music like that many people would look for another method of making music. to be more clear the Chiptune music is like the evolution of human beings or the beginning of the Big Bang Theory ... without Chiptune the Electronica genre (which is very wide gender) would be eliminated ... and speaking of this community I will think those people who do Chiptune could not exist (it is as if they had never been born) such as [Ben Briggs, Hylian Lemon, DaMonz, Ethan Rex, Theory of N and more] to conclude without Chiptune is like living in black and white (is say BORING). (Just use the imagination)

this is just a guess THANKS FOR READING MY WALL OF LETTERS

I would like to know your opinion.... please do not leave me "talking" alone .... that's terrible 

V I use the real name of respect towards people V

EDIT: after seeing his argument (Nabeel Ansari) Chiptune It is not related with Electronica 

v Remember im watching you v

Edited August 2, 2016 by Yosh1PrisMa
My body is Shivering (O_o)

[Nabeel Ansari]

The electronica genre at large has never concerned itself with small soundchips found in game consoles. Sound synthesis, resampling, and electronic music in general was conceived long before and not even in direct relation before or after the advent of chiptune music.

To say electronica would not exist without chiptunes is simply historically inaccurate. Chiptunes have nothing to do with the advancement of electronic music since synthesizer technology has been created and developed for years completely independent of what game soundchips were doing. The Moog was pioneered in the 1960s. That was when computers were still gigantic machines that lined the walls of a control room.

This is of course except until the recent couple decades where emulating chiptunes became an appealing aspect of music and thus we started seeing it infused into our electronic music as an instrumentation choice. You could say chiptunes have had a profound (but latent) effect on the electronica genre as it's opened up opportunities to exploit the appeal of those nostalgic digital game sounds.

It would be more accurate to say that without the advent of the analog synthesizer, game soundchips might not have existed; but that's the equivalent of saying if guns were not invented, we would still be using the precursor to guns. It's true if the premise is "if it was never invented and never could be for the purposes of the thought experiment" but false if the premise is more realistic such as "if it wasn't invented then, it would just be a matter of time until it was invented at some other time". If you prefer the former premise, it's not a very insightful thought experiment since it isn't based on critically analyzing patterns of reality.

[AngelCityOutlaw]

I can go back further -The theremin was invented in the 1920s. Probably the first electronic instrument ever.

That's half a century before the Atari 2600

[lazygecko]

Chiptunes were invented in 1930s Soviet Russia.

 

 

[jmr]

10 hours ago, lazygecko said:

Chiptunes were invented in 1930s Soviet Russia.

As cool sounding as those videos are, they're not chiptune. Calling them chiptune is like calling a horse and buggy the first automobile.

[lazygecko]

4 hours ago, jmr said:

As cool sounding as those videos are, they're not chiptune. Calling them chiptune is like calling a horse and buggy the first automobile.

If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, etc...

The term chiptune has been malleable since its inception. IIRC, the term itself was coined when describing sample-based Amiga modules attempting to mimic the sound of SID and other sound chips. So approximitations like that was enough to qualify it as such. But then today you have some purists who would go so far as to say that anything that isn't coming from an authentic chip in real time is not an actual chiptune, which would technically disqualify that which the name was actually initially describing.

I don't really like chiptune or chipmusic as a genre name for reasons like those. But then, genres in general are messy fluid things that seldom ever make sense. The early Russian examples use a different method of producing the sounds, but in the end the characteristics and sequencing techniques are much the same. It's a neat example of a kind of inevitable musical convergence derived from technical constraints.

[jmr]

I see your point, and agree with what you say about the adaptable definition of chiptune. My thinking was that chiptune (regardless of whether or not it's produced by an actual sound chip, or a tracked sequence of samples) is inherently digital. I don't think you'd find anyone who'd disagree with that. The video examples you linked are entirely analog. The composition is made by drawing shapes on paper and photographing them on a film strip, and the playback is done using a standard film projector (a beam of light shines through the film which exposes a variable amount of light to a photodetector, which is connected to an amplifier). There's no hard limitation to the complexity of sound that could be reproduced in this method and technology, in theory one (with a lot of patience and time) could draw out the exact images needed to reproduce, say, a perfect recreation of a human voice or an orchestra.  

In short, if chiptune is a duck, I'd argue that those graphical sound compositions are a whole 'nother species of bird.  Maybe a swan. 

I don't like using "chiptune" as a genre name either. It's more of a tool set or instrument than it is it's own style of music. But I will concede that if you were to look at what is typically classified in the genre of "chiptune", then those compositions would indeed fit right in. I don't hear too many people calling the swaths of moog synthesizer records released in the 60's and 70's "chiptune" albums, though. 

[zircon]

I think a defining characteristic of chiptune music - what people tend to think of when they hear the term - is the use of waveforms that are very much raw and unprocessed. Old video game consoles tended to not have advanced modulation and filtering features resulting in a very raw oscillator sound. Simple squares, saw, triangle, noise. Those old Moog synth records tended to use lots of processing... filters, LFOs, envelopes, etc. So that would be one difference IMO.

[RushJet1]

12 minutes ago, zircon said:

I think a defining characteristic of chiptune music - what people tend to think of when they hear the term - is the use of waveforms that are very much raw and unprocessed. Old video game consoles tended to not have advanced modulation and filtering features resulting in a very raw oscillator sound. Simple squares, saw, triangle, noise. Those old Moog synth records tended to use lots of processing... filters, LFOs, envelopes, etc. So that would be one difference IMO.

That and the limitations of any given system in terms of voice count, volume, etc.  That's mostly what gave the systems their characteristic sounds.

[Nabeel Ansari]

The philosophical question posed was specifically about 8-bit music, which is inherently a digital sound chip concept; whatever you can classify as chiptune doesn't matter because the person asked a very specific question about what kind of music is omitted from this proposed new history.

I think that's an important distinction to make because if you're going to ask a question like "what if 8-bit music didn't exist? wouldn't electronica not exist?", it demonstrates a huge flaw in historic reasoning (see my immediate response as to why). If you're going to broaden the question to be "what if old synthesizers were never invented?" then it falls into the latter aspect of my response, which is that electronica:

1) wouldn't exist on the premise that they never were invented and thus never could be simply for sake of the experiment

2) would exist because of patterns of reality i.e. if something isn't invented it's going to be invented at some point if not in some different form (see the simultaneous invention of Calculus by two different mathematicians)

For the original question though, my point was that electronica music has never stemmed from any historic root in old digital soundchips. I guess you could make the case that old soundchips might have paved the way for more superior digital chips we see in more modern synth hardware but... I think that causality might be attributed incorrectly there. I doubt old game console soundchips led innovation or to the development of more improved digital sound hardware, I think they were simply created in parallel as a byproduct of where the tech was back then.

[Tex]

On 03/08/2016 at 6:14 PM, jmr said:

I don't like using "chiptune" as a genre name either. It's more of a tool set or instrument than it is it's own style of music.

Sure. You can have 8-bit blues or even NES rave music. And some soundchips are more preferable to imitate certain styles of music than others. Still...

On 03/08/2016 at 6:14 PM, jmr said:

But I will concede that if you were to look at what is typically classified in the genre of "chiptune", then those compositions would indeed fit right in.

If cinema gave birth to what we call "film scores", I think games also derived their own genres. For instance, gaming experience generated certain types of boss music (e.g. The Simpsons Arcade Game). They don't sound like anything created before. That unless game composers could clarify if their main inspirations are from outside of games. Or if the own characteristics of chiptune composition gave origin to these types of music.