Power Users and Retro Puppets
A Critical Study of the Methods and Motivations in Chipmusic
Anders Carlsson (info@goto80.com)
Master's thesis, VT 2010
Department of Media and Communication Studies
Lund University
Supervisor: Peter Dahlgren
Examiner: Fredrik Miegel
Abstract
Anders Carlsson: Power Users and Retro Puppets - a Critical Study of the Methods and Motivations
in Chipmusic. (Department of Media and Communication Studies, Lund University)
The thesis interviews people who produce chipmusic - a music style that evolved in the 1980s from
the use of computers and game consoles that featured primitive digital sounds. It has seen a
renaissance in the past decade and is commonly understood as an act of nostalgia or a
reappropriation of technology. The aim of the thesis is to achieve a deeper understanding of how
and why people make chipmusic by interviewing ten active musicians. The purpose is to develop
concepts that can explain how chipmusicians adapt to and move away from fundamental features of
digital media, and what meanings they ascribe to it. The main topic of study is thefore how
individuals talk about their music, but this is combined with in-depth studies of the media that they
use, and the cultures that they work in. As such, it is a cross-disciplinary approach inbetween
computer science and social science.
The results show that chipmusicians describe their media in terms of limitations. They tend
to talk about how software interfaces condition their work rather than hardware platforms. There is
a common desire for individual transgression, mostly in relation to software interfaces and culture
and not the underpinning platforms. The focus on interface contradicts the popular understanding of
chipmusic as a consequence of hardware platforms. Four broader discourses are identified and
described as anti-nostalgia, control, hacker aesthetics and digital economics.
Keywords: platform studies, 8-bit, chipmusic, soundchip, hackers, demoscene, nostalgia, aesthetics,
interface, transgression, immersion, hauntology
1
Index
1
Abstract
2
Index
4
Looking for the Perfect Beep
6
A Brief History of Chipmusic
From Universal Information to Cheap Beeps
The Demoscene and the Soundtrack of Copying
The Chipscene and Digital Authenticity
13
The Materiality of Chipmusic
The Soundchip as a Problem Child
The Platform
Interface as the Control Room
Reception/Operation
19
A Theoretical Framework: Nostalgia, Hauntology and Essentialism
21
An Internet Methodology
The Selection Process
About Internet Interviews
The Interview Process
25
Results: Making Chipmusic - and its Significance
Introducing the Musicians
26
Media Aesthetics
- The Authentic Imperfection
- Hardware or Software?
- Interface Immediacy
2
- An Aesthetics of the Machine?
31
Chipmusic Practices
- Limitations as Obstacles and Springs
- Expressive Effects and the Pressure of Patterns
- From Idea to Music
- Immersion
39
Going Beyond the System
42
Chipmusic Discourses
- Anti-Nostalgia
- Control
- Hacker Aesthetics
- Digital Economics
51
Final Discussion
53
Glossary
54
List of References
3
Looking for the Perfect Beep
At the third quarter of Super Bowl in 1984, the large big screen showed a commercial based on
George Orwell's dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. A grey mass of humans are succumbed to a
large screen showing Big Brother talking about the 'Unification of Thoughts'. Suddenly a woman
destroys the screen with a hammer, followed by a message: "On January 24th, Apple Computer will
introduce the Macintosh. And you'll see why 1984 won't be like 1984" (Stein 2002). Apple, with its
roots in hacker culture, positioned themselves in polemic against the corporate conformity of IBM
and Microsoft.
Fast forward to 2010 and Apple has manufactured some of the most locked-down tools on
the market. Their iPhone can only run software that has been approved by and sold through Apple,
unless the user hacks it. Many manufacturers use similar strategies for computers, phones and
software. Even if you know how to improve a gadget that you bought, you would probably breach a
license agreement or infringe a patent or copyright by doing so. In the digital world, "freedom of
expression is no longer relevant; freedom of use has taken its place.” (Galloway and Thacker 2007).
Perhaps this is why chipmusic has become popular in the past decade. This music evolved
from the use of computers and game consoles in the 1980s, with 8-bit capacities that most people
find laughable today. It had characteristic beeps and squeeks that signify Super Mario Bros and
nostalgia. But not for everyone. The way that chipmusicians sink their teeth into various "obsolete"
technologies to produce music that has not been heard before, cannot be dismissed merely as a
primitive nostalgia. In a digitalized culture, it is inherently political to reclaim technology in this
way. Chipmusicians have taken the Nintendo Gameboy (1989), primarily used for playing video
games, and programmed it to become a tool for live music performances - despite Nintendo's efforts
to stop them.1 Chipmusicians make media do new things, akin to how contemporary political
activist inject new meanings into systems of power. In fact, the old manager of Sex Pistols,
Malcolm McLaren, called chipmusic the new "8 bit punk" (McLaren 2003).
As such it is easy to label chipmusic as a re-appropriation of technology. In fact, it is a bit
too easy. While there are chipmusicians who seem to push the physical limitations of the media,
many chipmusicians are better described as pushing the conceptual limitations of the media. We
have ideas about what chipmusic media are supposed to do, and chipmusicians challenge those
ideas.
1
Nintendo has closed down a number of shops that sell the hardware that is required to make your own cartridges for
the Gameboy.
4
The thesis is an attempt to achieve a deeper understanding of the ways that digital media
can empower and disempower its users. The aim is to interview chipmusicians about how and why
they use soundchip media. The purpose is to develop concepts to describe how chipmusicians adapt
to and move away from fundamental features of digital media, and what meanings they ascribe to it.
In order to discuss the uses of the media, the thesis is underpinned by a detailed study of the
materiality of the media, as suggested in philosophy by Olsen et al (2009), in new media studies by
Bogost & Montfort (2009) and in critical theory by Taylor (Taylor 2009). This is presented in the
second chapter, which has been written to be accessible for most readers.
The first chapter describes the history of this materiality as it developed in the shifting
cultural conditions that has surrounded chipmusic. The main idea of the chapter however, is to give
a background to the aesthetics and culture of chipmusic. There is also a short chapter that defines
three theoretical concepts as they are used in the interview analyses: nostalgia, hauntology and
essentialism.
These chapters are based on previous academic studies of chipmusic to the extent that it was
possible. However, these chapters would not have been possible without my own experiences as a
chipmusician. As an active practioner I have tried to focus on aspects that have been missing in
previous research, but also taken the opportunity to criticize some naturalized myths and ideological
assumptions that seem to permeat chipmusic. This requires a number of considerations which are
discussed in chapter four along with general methodological aspects of the internet interviews that
have been conducted.
The results are presented in three themes: media aesthetics, chipmusic practices and a
section entitled 'Going beyond the system'. This is followed by a study of four discourses as
identified in the material: anti-nostalgia, control, hacker aesthetics and digital economics.
5
A Brief History of Chipmusic
There is a popular understanding of of chipmusic as a direct consequence of technology. The scarce
amount of chipmusic studies hints that the music has also been shaped as part of changing cultural
conditions (Collins 2008, Driscoll & Diaz 2008, Dittbrenner 2007). This historiography will expand
on such a theme. It attempts to describe the how the aesthetics of chipmusic has been formed in an
interplay between technology and culture. The first section concerns the pre-soundchip era of digital
music and gives a cultural context to the appearance of soundchip media in the late 1970s. These
media were widely used in the hobbyist demoscene subculture, where the term chipmusic was first
used towards 1990. About ten years later, chipmusic dispersed to a larger pop cultural context and
was re-defined and diversified while still using many of the standards developed in the demoscene.
A key theme in this chapter is the desire to maximize the potentails of the media in techno-cultures
where music was not always highly prioritized.
From Universal Information to Cheap Beeps
The first computer music was closely connected with the academic field of information theory. In
1948 Claude E. Shannon presented the mathematical theory of information that defined information
as any discrete sequence of symbols chosen from a finite set (Shannon 1948). In a way, it was an
answer to the long lasting modernist dream of a universal language. Sounds, images and texts could
be translated into the same kind of digital information and used with the newly developed computer
technologies. The earliest digital music was developed in this spirit. Geoff Hill and his colleagues in
Sydney played the first computer music in 1951 (Doornbusch 2004). The computer they used did
not have any dedicated hardware to generate sound, but it did have a loudspeaker that could play
beeps. This was a useful form of feedback, seeing that the computer did not have a screen. The
loudspeaker was a data receiver just like the RAM or the printer, so it was easy to send a string of
numbers to produce a noisy sound. Hill realized that he could send 1's and 0's (the binary computer
language) at certain speeds to generate tones. The faster he sent them, the higher tones the
loudspeaker would play. Consider how an old door goes from 'crackling' to 'squeeking' as the
frequency increases. In this way he managed to compose the first digital music. A few years later
Max Mathews started to make music as a "by-product" of his research on speech and
communication at Bell Laboratories (Mathews, 1963). Mathews claimed that “[t]here are no
theoretical limitations to the performance of the computer as a source of musical sounds" (Mathews
6
1963). He used information theory to co-produce the first album with digital music with the telling
title 'Music From Mathematics' (1961). There were pop music renditions but most of the music was
sound experiments somewhere inbetween engineer aesthetics and avant-garde composing.
Digital sounds reached a wider audience in the 1970s with the advent of electronic games.
Although the first arcade games like Pong (1972) had very minimal sound effects, the game
companies knew that sounds were vital to make the games "intense and realistic" (Collins 2008:8).
Soundchips were introduced to increase the quality of the sounds without using more computer
resources that was needed for the code and graphics. The Atari VCS (1977) was the first game
console with a soundchip, but it did not offer much more than the Australians had done in 1951. In
particular, its odd range of available notes forced composers to make music in dissonant scales that
connotated death and despair (Collins 2006).
In the 1970s computer technology became cheap enough for personal use, and some argue
that this hobbyist movement holds the sociocultural roots for chipmusic (Dittbrenner 2007:87). The
hacker movement of the 1970s was a peculiar mixture of counter-culture and commerce where
some chipmusic experiments were made (see Markoff, 2005; Levy, 1994; Barbrook & Cameron,
1996). The League of Automatic Music Composers performed live with networked computers and
talked about global democratic communication networks while others formed commercial computer
companies, such as Apple. The Apple II (1977) was the first popular home computer, and
interestingly enough it did not have a soundchip but relied on similar techniques as George Hill did
in the 1950s. A few years later, all the most popular home computers and game consoles used
soundchips: Commodore 64, Nintendo Entertainment System, and the Atari and Spectrum machines
all used so-called PSG-soundchips. They contained pre-defined sounds that were very primitive
compared to other contemporary digital sounds, such as the Fairlight synthesizer.
Through the soundchip the sound of digital consumer electronics had been restricted to a
few pre-defined beeps, as opposed to the ideas of Mathews universalism. It was a question of
economics in three ways. First, sound was required to maximize the commercial appeal for the
realistic gaming experience. Secondly, soundchips allocated resources for code and graphics.
Thirdly, soundchips were designed to be cheap to manufacture.
The Demoscene and the Soundtrack of Copying
As early as 1979 there were digital networks in USA that distributed Apple II software for free
(Walleij 1999). So called crackers removed the copy protection (if there was any) and like graffiti
writers they tagged their work by adding a signature to the game. These signatures were called
7
crack-intros and grew from simple text screens to moving graphics and music. The crackers had to
make the intros small to fit with the limited amount of memory left by the game. They started to
release the intros as separate productions, which by 1986 had become known as demos.2 The
purpose was to demonstrate your skills by pushing the limits of the computer, producing more
pixels, sprites and sounds – often more so than the commercial programmers. There was an
aesthetical maximalism, where more was better than less (see Botz 2008).
The demoscene musicians followed in the footsteps of the commercial actors. The first
demos typically used songs that had been extracted from games. It was also common to sample
small bits of pop-music, such as Madonna or Michael Jackson. In his dissertation on the
demoscene, Botz argues that these musical appropriations gave demos an alibi due to its clear
references to pop culture (Botz 2008:49).
When demosceners started to make their own compositions they would still use elements
from games. They looked at the code of a game to study how the sounds were made, and then
composed their own songs using that code. This was only natural, considering the lack of music
software at the time. The software that existed did not use the hardware efficiently, and could
therefore not be used in games or demos. Even the commercial game musicians did not use
dedicated music software, but composed their music using the same tools as programmers did. This
way they were able to gain maximum control considering the available resources (Driscoll and Diaz
2008).
In 1986 the game musician Chris Hülsbeck released the music program Soundmonitor for
Commodore 64. It combined technical efficiency with a user interface and became widely used
among chipmusicians. Hülsbeck's ideas were further developed by Karsten Obarski in 1987, when
he released Soundtracker for the Amiga. The program established the term tracker, which uses
vertical representation instead of the traditional horizontal lines of note sheets, also popular in
commercial music software at the time. It can be described as a compromise between a userfriendly interface and the control that chipmusicians required (Ratliff 2007). Soundtracker was a
commercial failure but became a standard interface for chipmusicians, still to this day.
Demosceners studied and manipulated the programs and released their own versions of it, such as
Rockmonitor and Protracker. While the appropriation of software and music had started to generate
law suits elsewhere, the demoscene was allowed to continue its activities perhaps due to its small
scale and non-commercial activities. Demoscene musicians were able to work outside of formal
2
Groups such as Triad and 1001 Crew called their producions demos.
8
laws and economics, and developed their own rules where it was okay to appropriate content 'from
the outside' but not from fellow demosceners.3
The Amiga computer was able to play samples in a rather high quality. Unlike the low-fi
beeps of previous soundchips, the Amiga made it possible to make music that sounded like "real"
music. Amiga trackers became popular among underground dance music producers due to its
affordibility. The British group Urban Shakedown even reached the British charts in 1991 with their
Amiga song Some Justice. The issue for demosceners though, was that sampled sounds required
extensive amounts of memory. Amiga game musicians experimented early with more economic
sound production. Games like Hybris (1988) used mathematic algorithms to synthesize sounds
instead of using samples. It minimized the use of resources, and sounded similar to the music of
earlier computers and consoles. Following SidMON (1988) there were several programs to make
synthetic Amiga music but the sample-based Soundtracker and its derivates remained the most
popular (Kotlinski 2009). In 1989 musicians such as 4-mat and Duz began to simulate synthetic
sounds in Soundtracker. They used only a fraction of a sample (like 100 bytes) and looped it to
create a single waveform – a 'beep'. This meant that the music used very little resources, but you
could still use the Soundtracker interface. It was common that the music flirted with or even
remixed C64 game musicians such as Rob Hubbard and Martin Galway.
It was in this context that the term chipmusic was established. Just like the term 'live music'
appeared only with the introduction of recording (Auslander 2008), the chipmusic term was
established only when an alternative had appeared. On the Amiga some songs used very little
resources and sounded like older soundchip music, so they were called chipmusic. Chipmusic had a
cultural function and used an aesthetics that had been developed in previous music. It was not
merely a consequence of technology.
Throughout the 1990s the term was mainly used in the Amiga and PC-demoscenes for
sample-based music made in Soundtracker-like programs such as Fasttracker II. Chipmusic was
distributed for free in the prosumer culture of the demoscene, but rarely reached a wider audience at
the time.
The Chipscene and Digital Authenticity
At the turn of the millenium computer music tools had grown into highly complex software. With
the purpose of pleasing as many people as possible, software was designed from a universalist
3
In the Amiga demoscene it was common to sample sounds from recording artists and claim ownership to the sounds in
the demoscene context. "Don't steal my samples!" was a common phrase in the Amiga demoscene.
9
perpsective. The experienced composer Brian Eno said: "It's as though a new layer of bureaucracy
has interposed itself between me and the music we want to make." (Eno 1999)⁠ . Musicians who
shared this view were searching for higher levels of control or intimacy. Some people saw
chipmusic as a way to go back to the roots. The limited amount of options and lack of user-friendly
interfaces had a "raw" feeling compared to other digital tools. It was possible to take charge and
push the machine to its limits, which demosceners had been doing for a long time already. For
others it was a way to give up control and to accept the built-in characteristics of the media.
What can be called the chipscene is what came out of this movement around 2000. A key
factor in this development was the website micromusic.net. It was founded in 1999 with the slogan
"low-tech music for high-tech people" (Esposto et al 2001:38). Part community, part record label, it
grew into an important social platform for low-tech musicians and had 3500 member after two
years, which is quite a lot considering it was "Web 1.0".4 Anyone could upload music but only a
few were selected by the anonymous jury at the site, therefore maintaining a certain stylistic
coherence. Although it is difficult to see a coherence in the selection, it was certainly different from
the demoscene chipmusic. It was less concerned with the technical expertise that was so important
in the demoscene. Micromusic was a playful use of low-fi sounds, more akin to punk than
programming. Perhaps that is why there were so few demosceners at micromusic.net. The most
well-known micromusic artists came from the alternative dance music scene, releasing records on
the renowned experimental record label Rephlex.5
An important function of micromusic.net was the club events that was organized mainly in
North Western Europe. In 2003 there were about 50 parties mostly in Europe but also USA.6 The
same year the ex-manager of Sex Pistols Malcolm McLaren made several appearances in
mainstream media and talked about chipmusic as the new "8-bit punk" that revolted against a hitech karaoke-culture (McLaren 2003). In Sweden, the Gameboy-musicians Puss were nominated for
a Grammy Award7 and there was even a weekly chipmusic show on national radio.8 Chipmusic was
entering in a dialogue with other pop cultural phenomena, which diversified the ideas and uses that
surrounded chipmusic. Technological purism became less relevant when chipmusic became a music
genre among others. Bands like Slagsmålsklubben who made beepy pop music that reminded
people of old videogame music, were sometimes labelled as chipmusic or chiptune although they
4
Figures from an informal interview with Gino Esposto
DMX Krew, Lektrogirl, Cylob and Bodenständig 2000 were active in both forums.
6
According to the event list found at www.micromusic.net
7
http://www.musikhuset.se/galor/grammisgalan.2003.1.htm
8
Syntax Error was a 30 minute part of the P3-show Frank, aired between 2001 and 2003
5
10
used analogue synthesizers.9 Chipmusic was discussed as a music genre more separated from
technology. As a consequence, more experimental and dark types of soundchip-based music was
not necessarily labelled as chipmusic.10
This conceptual transformation was perceived as a threatening heterology by some
chipmusicians. For them chipmusic was not about style but about using certain technology to
maximize its potential. Dubmood said: “[The soundchip] is an instrument like any other instrument,
and definitely not a genre" (Rydén 2006). The unifying factor was the choice of media. It was a
claim for authenticity that formed what Bourdieu calls a defensive discourse for orthodoxy
(1995:73). Technology was said to be the distinctive feature of 'real' chipmusic, and dialogues with
other cultural fields were discarded as "fake". In this sense, there was a conflict between those who
saw chipmusic as a style, aesthetics or genre and those who saw it as a consequence of technology.
This conflict is more extensively described in (Carlsson 2008)⁠ .
Chipmusic gradually came to be defined as anything made with soundchips, atleast by its
practioners. It was embedded in a discourse similar to the demoscene, where it was important to
push its limits. This technodeterminist definition grew stronger with the popularization of the
Gameboy. New software such as Nanoloop and LSDj had turned the Gameboy into a portable
music tool. It became emblematic for chipmusic as a subversion of entertainment commodities; as a
statement against hi-tech capitalism. Chipmusicians were often described as over-riding the
supposedly pre-encoded purposes of the Gameboy to use it as a musical instrument.
Micromusic.net gradually faded in popularity, perhaps because of the jury that selected
which music to publish, perhaps because of their disinterest with technological purism. The
American site 8bitcollective.com appeared in 2005 as "the first completely open free chiptunerelated media repository".11 The term chiptune had become the dominant term for chipmusic,
possibly due to the popular chipmusic news site vorc.org. Today 8bitcollective has 17,000
registered members and typically offers atleast 20 new user-uploaded songs every day. They use a
Gameboy in their logotype and regularly feature discussions about what is 8-bit and what is
"fakebit".
Glashüttner (2010:30) describes three common traits in the chipscene: 1) showing off
technical skills, 2) protectionism vis-a-vis ignorant outsiders, but also 3) welcoming those who are
interested. In this sense, the demoscene and the chipscene are quite similar. Both are rather distinct
scenes that are still quite easy to get into if you understand the code of conduct. Most demoscene
9
Some people called this Bitpop or Micromusic and separated it from chipmusic.
Some examples are Patric Catani, Ed, DJ Scotch Egg, Chantal Goret
11
First appeared as music.gameboymall.com. http://8bitcollective.com/faq Accessed 7 December 2009
10
11
chipmusicians and chipscene musicians use similar tools and produce music that, to an outsider, is
almost identical. Even so, it is only recently that the chipscene and the demoscene has started to
interact with eachother. There is still only a minority of demosceners that are active on chipscene
labels and forums, and very few chipscene-musicians appear in demoscene productions.
Considering the different histories of the two subcultures, it is perhaps not surprising. It
seems likely that the chipscene was a heterology for the demoscene because it redefined and
recontextualized a form of music that had been developed within the demoscene (atleast if you ask
demosceners). At the moment, the chipscene finds itself in a similar situation when mainstream
artists regularly incorporate chip-aesthetics in their music. One example of the 'collective
protectionism' that characterizes chipmusicians and demosceners, is the almost campaign-like
criticism that followed when the hip-hop producer Timbaland sampled chipmusic for a Nelly
Furtado song.12 Another example is the scepticism that Malcolm McLaren met when approaching
the chipscene.(GwEm 2004)⁠
This chapter has problematized the common stipulation that "[t]he only things
consistent within Chiptunes are the tools" (Yabsley 2007). Even a low-level hacker music culture
such as the chipscene has a history of social and cultural practices that has shaped the current
practices, aesthetics and understandings of chipmusic. It is what Bjurström calls a process of
stylization (Bjurström 2005) which involves both dialogues with others and various efforts that aim
for distinction. One distinctive feature of chipmusic was the choice of medium, which helped to
give the music an identity and legitimacy among other forms of music.
In the next chapter I will show how the materiality of chipmusic media is constituted by
platforms and interfaces that embody cultural values and human deliberations. This will serve as a
basis for understanding the interviews with the musicians about why and how they make chipmusic.
12
As mentioned in Carlsson (2008). More details are available at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timbaland_plagiarism_controversy. Accessed 3 April 2010.
12
The Materiality of Chipmusic
The previous chapter described how chipmusic aesthetics developed in an interplay between
technology and culture where maximisation was often omnipresent. The views of chipmusic media
changed as new uses were enabled, and also because the media became 'retro' in a pop cultural
context. The way that game consoles such as the Gameboy was turned into music instruments is an
example of what can be called ontopolitics (Law 2007). The definition of a process or a thing, such
as the ontology of a computer, is not something that exists as independent from cultural and
political values. The fascination of chipmusic often comes from an idea that the media were not
intended to be used for making music. However, modern chipmusic has its roots in the 1980s, and
they were used for making music already back then.
The materiality of chipmusic media is constituted by both physical platforms and software
interfaces, but also the cultural conditions. The platforms were conditioned by economic incentives
that lead to cheap products that had a degree of uncertainty to them. The interfaces were designed to
control the platforms using only the limited resources made available in the context of games and
demos. Software standardized several aesthetical elements which are often thought to be inherent in
the hardware.
To make sense of this complexity I will use a model developed by Montfort & Bogost for a
discipline that they call platform studies that studies "the connection between technical specifics
and culture" (2009:146). Platform studies works with five levels of digital media, and each one is
connected to cultural conditions. The platform is the most basic level of the media that can be
programmed. This is usually hardware, but can also be software such as Java or Flash that is more
platform-independent. The code is the instructions that control the platform, and programmers write
programs that have a certain form/function that enables and disables certain uses. The interface is
the front-end of the platform, from which reception/operation can occur. Montfort & Bogost
emphasize that each level should be studied as part a cultural context.
In the case of chipmusic, a platform is typically an old computer such as Commodore 64,
consisting of physical objects like a soundchips and a processor. However, these objects contain
software that controls what the hardware does. In digital media at large, software is omnipresent.
And on the other hand, software requires hardware to be able to run. Without the right hardware,
software is useless, or as Kittler puts it, "software does not exist" (Kittler 1995)⁠ .
This also relates to the question of which media are to be considered as legitimate tools for
chipmusic. Machines such as Playstation and certain mobile phones have soundchips but are rarely
13
discussed as chipmusic media. On the other hand, consoles such as the Gameboy or NES do not
contain a physically separate soundchip but are generally considered as two of the most popular
chipmusic media. widely used by chipmusicians. To complicate matters further, chipmusic as we
knew it in the 1990s, did not rely on soundchips at all (see p. 9). But the most crucial reason to talk
about platforms and interfaces rather than hardware and software, is that many chipmusicians work
with emulator software. Emulators for PC, Mac, iPhone, etc, mimick old media as well as possible,
and are used as a platform in the platform, so to say.
The thesis concentrates on the levels of platform, interface and reception/operation
and the cultural conditions they appear in. I will start by explaining what a soundchip is, since its
features underpin the aesthetics of soundchips regardless of what media are used to make the
chipmusic.
The Soundchip as a Problem Child
It is commonly stipulated that chipmusic is made despite of the hardware and not because of it.
There is a focus on the limitations rather than the potentials. Dittbrenner (2007) mentions four
typical restrictions with chipmusic platforms. Polyphony (amount of sounds that can be played
simultaneously) and timbre (the character of the sound) is part of the soundchip, and two other
aspects are external to the soundchip: memory (RAM and storage on floppy disks or cartridges) and
external factors (processor speed and frame-rate). Soundchips can be thought of as cheap
synthesizers that can play 2-5 sounds at the same time and an equally limited amount of timbres.
The most common timbre of soundchips is the square wave, which is a result of the binary nature of
computers: on or off. The other waveforms are also based in basic digital logics such as addition
and subtraction, as can be seen in Fig 1. The square wave roughly sounds like a clarinet, the saw
wave resembles a trumpet, and the triangle wave form has a similar timbre to a flute. The noise
waveform is made by a random number generator that gives a sound similar to TV-noise, or
explosions and percussions for chipmusicians. These waveforms are crucial for chipmusic
aesthetics, although it is possible to produce other waveforms by using more memory and/or
processor power.
Fig 1. Common soundchip waveforms: square wave, saw tooth, triangle wave and noise.
14
The cheap production of soundchips caused problems for many musicians. The Atari 2600 had a
bizarre tonal spectrum, comparable to two detuned pianos with random keys taken out, often
resulting in very eerie music (Collins 2006). There can also be timbral differences between
soundchips that are supposed to be identical. Tomczak shows this in his study of the Gameboy
(2007), that even individual units of the same model can vary in sound. The Commodore 64 is
notorious in this aspects, and it was difficult to make music that sounded good on all C64s due to
the "bugs" in the hardware. Furthermore, soundchips can also be unpredictable in themselves,
triggering instruments slightly different or adding clicks and noises for no apparent reason.
Artefacts such as these give a characteristic sound that has traditionally been suppressed by
software.
Soundchips also had features to help the musician to compose, therefore reproducing certain
ideas of music. The most clear example is the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), which
soundchip was designed by composer Yukio Kaneoka. Each channel of the soundchip had its own
characteristics, which encouraged musicians to use a specific instrumentation: one lead, one
backing instrument, one bass and then percussion/sound effects.13 According to Collins (2008:25) it
was rare that NES-composers diverged from this concept.
What sets soundchips apart from each other, except for the timbre, is often the effects that
they offer for expressive elements. Amplitude envelopes are used to create a dynamic in sound
volume. Soundchips use a (limited) variant of the popular synthesizer standard ADSR (attack,
decay, sustain, release). For example, an instrument can have a high or low attack – as the
difference between plucking a violin string or gently drawing the bow across the string. Another
common expressive features is pulse-width modulation (PWM), which alters the timbre of the
squarewave between nasal and more bass-like. Most soundchips have other media-specific
expressive features. For example, the Commodore 64 has functions to mix two sounds to produce a
third one, and filters that decrease certain frequencies of the sound.
13
One channel had a sweep-function that could slide between two notes. It was useful for expressive lead-sounds that
used vibrato or glides, such as in a guitar solo. The second channel did not have a sweep-function, and was therefore
more similar to backing harmonies, like a piano. The third channel was tuned one octave below the others and did not
have any volume control, therefore mostly used for bass sounds. The two remaining channels were almost always used
for percussion or sound effects, since it used small samples and noise-sounds.
15
The Platform
A chipmusic platform is a soundchip but in its technical context. Chipmusicians cannot use the
soundchip any way they please, but are also conditioned by for example the amount of memory and
the speed of the processor. For example, if you browse online chipmusic archives14 you will notice
that a majority of the songs run in one of three tempos, eventhough there is nothing in the
soundchip that encourages this. Since most computers and consoles were designed to work with
televisions, the 'internal rhythm' of the machines was synchronized to the TV-signals (50 frames per
second in Europe). The tempo of the music was a consequence which in short meant that
chipmusicians chose between 98, 125 or 152 beats per minute, roughly corresponding to the tempos
of hip hop, pop and techno. Many contemporary chipmusic programs work within the same limits,
although other tempos are possible to achieve.
The speed of the processor (CPU) determines how quickly the musician can access the
soundchip. With a faster CPU it is possible to make more detailed sounds by changing the pitch,
volume or timbre with a higher precision. Some chipmusic forces the CPU to access the soundchip
faster, but only occassionally in demos and games.15 The amount of storage (ROM) and memory
(RAM) also conditioned the aesthetics of chipmusic. The instruments and sequences of chipmusic
typically use around 4 kilobytes, which corresponds to two pages of this thesis. A typical strategy to
limit the filesize is to repeat parts of the songs many times, resulting in loop-based pop music rather
than, say, a more dynamic piece of classical music (Collins 2008b).
The restrictions in tempo, sound fidelity and storage are as much cultural as they are
technical. The amount of digital resources that chipmusic use in demos and games is signifantly less
than the graphics and code (Collins 2008a).
Interface as the Control Room
The key issue with designing chipmusic software is to give maximum control but only use a
mimumum of resources. Music had to leave resources for code and graphics in games and demos.
The aforementioned Soundmonitor and Soundtracker pioneered a new music interface called
trackers. It works fundamentally different from the so-called piano-roll sequencers that dominate
the computer music industry. Trackers are designed to make music step-by-step and by hand,
starting with the smallest sub-elements of an instrument. It puts the user close to the platform by
14
15
Some examples are High Voltage SID Collection, ASMA, SMS Power and Project AY,
Early examples are Michael Winterberg's and Martin Galway's C64-music from 1986.
16
making both notes and sound-parameters easily accessible in the "note sheet". It encourages a form
of detailed musical programming, when piano-roll sequencers usually hide such features in submenus or external devices.16 Trackers can be thought of as a more elaborate form of note sheet,
designed to maximise a limited amount of resources.
I will briefly explain two ideal types of trackers: the user-friendly soundtrackers and the
highly efficient hyper sequencers.17 Soundtrackers use small beep sounds that the musician
modulates by hand in the "note sheet", or pattern. Every expressive effect with pitch and volume is
set directly next to the notes. Figure 2 shows how the composer has used the C and A commands
next to the notes. C sets the volume, while A sets a gradual volume fade out.
The hyper sequencer is a more abstract way of composing, and offers a more efficient use of
the platform. The term was used by Phelps (2007) who described it as similar to programming,
since it the composer defines "links" to reference other parts of the music. The song is arrangement
is a list of numbers that refer to blocks of notes, called patterns. These patterns contain references to
instruments, which are blocks of instructions to the soundchip.
A fundamental difference between soundtrackers and hyper sequencers is that the latter can
be used to sequence each voice independent from the other. One voice can repeat a bassline loop,
while another voice plays a melody with many different patterns. In soundtrackers, the melody is
strung together with the bassline, which means that a variation in the melody requires more memory
since the bassline has to be copied. At the top-left of Fig 3, I05 refers to instrument number 5. This
instrument consists of numbers that points to specific places in the soundchips to set the timbre,
volume, filter and various effects.
eeFig 2. Protracker 3.15 (Amiga)
Fig 3. JCH Editor (Commodore 64)
16
Phelps (2007) explains the details in his bachelor's thesis project aimed at bringing the tracker interface into a modern
context
17
They are ideal types because most trackers are constituted by elements of the two types
17
Trackers remediate Western preconceptions about the tonality, rhythm and instrumentation of
music. Trackers use a tonal scale of 12-tone equal temperement, if the platform allows. They
encourage a time signature of 4/4 with its default patterns of 16 or 64 steps - meaning that it is more
obvious to make pop rhythms than jazz. They require the composer to define instruments, instead of
sequencing sonic elements more arbitrarily. Furthermore, trackers were designed to make music for
games and demos. Since music was usually allowed less resources than the code and the graphics
(Collins 2008a), the trackers could not be used to fully maximize the potential of the platform. In
other words, there were also cultural conditions that shaped the restrictions in the interface.
Reception/Operation
The level of reception/operation is the main topic of this thesis, so this section only mentions some
of the typical ways of operation. The way that chipmusicians have tried to push the limits of their
media helped to shape a form of aesthetical maximalism. More was better, atleast according to
those who wanted to be impressed by technical prowess and this helped to establish a number of
techniques. For example, chipmusicians often used so-called arpeggios to give the music a richer
harmony. An arpeggio quickly changes between several notes, giving an appearance of several
notes being played simultaneously. The alternative was to use three channels to play a chord, but
then there was no room for say bass, drums and melodies. The arpeggio effect was possible with
computers and synthesizers already in the 1960s, but was never as popular as it came to be in
chipmusic. Ornaments are melodic decorations that are not crucial for the melody itself. It brings
details much like a skilled guitarist that adds small improvisation around a pre-composed melody.
Chipmusic ornaments are produced by adding additional notes with for example lower volume,
slightly modified pitch and a different timbre.
In a "culture of maximalism" extensive uses of arpeggios and ornaments can be a seal of
quality, or a crowd-pleaser if you may. Perhaps this explains why the opposite approach – a
minimalistic and meditative ambient music with few details – is still rare in chipmusic. And perhaps
it can also explain why there has been so little chipmusic that is "out of control" such as fusion jazz,
breakcore, glitch/noise, or generative music. In the last decade this has become more common
though, particularly in the chipscene.18 Presumably this is because the recontextualization of
chipmusic led to an increased diversity in methods and motives, which is the topic of the next
chapter.
18
Some examples are Nq, Lukas Nystrand, Neurobit and Overthruster.
18
A Theoretical Framework: Nostalgia, Hauntology and
Essentialism
This chapter defines three concepts which will be used in the presentation of the interviews. There
can be many reasons to make chipmusic. Chapter two showed how chipmusic was a technical
necessity and an aesthetical preference in the 1990s, and later recontextualized and given new
meanings. The way that chipmusic appropriated lo-fi technologies and distributed music and
software for free, was given a new (political) relevance in the new millenium. It resonated with
ideas of do-it-yourself, remix culture, open source, hacking and critical media activism, but also
nostalgia and playfulness. As such, there are both conservative and radical dimension in chipmusic.
From previous research and informal studies of chipmusician biographies, journalistic texts and
documentaries aswell as my personal experience of chipmusic, I have constructed three ideal types
for the motivations and methods of chipmusicians: nostalgia, hauntology, and essentialism. The
purpose is to to define concepts that can be used to describe different tendencies in the interviews.
An individual musician is assumed to have different degrees of each ideal type. As such, they are
analytical concepts rather than descriptive categories.
It seems almost intuitive to describe chipmusic in terms of nostalgia. The term often implies
a romanticism of childhood memories, and a yearning for a somewhat idealized past (Boym,
2002:7). Nostalgia can be a memory of escaping teenage angst with digital technologies, or
reminiscing good times of playing video games with friends. Perhaps the distinct sounds of
chipmusic are associated with positive childhood memories in general. Chipmusic nostalgia can be
about travelling back in time by using or referencing videogame music and characters such as Super
Mario Bros.
A related approach is to modulate the memories and technologies of the past more along the
lines of retro fashion. Retro is an active reaction to the present; a stylistic choice to explore qualities
that were lost somewhere along the road – an "unsentimental nostalgia" (Guffey 2006). But there is
also a progressive vein among chipmusicians; about making something new with the old.19 The
low-tech tools and blurry memories of the past are mixed together with a new idea of the future; a
"nostalgia for the future" (Lanza, 2007:190). It rediscovers the lost potentials of rusty machines and
sounds from the past, similar to the ideas of retrofuturism and cyberpunk. In music, the term
The largest chipmusic festival, Blip Festival, states: "Devices such as […] are repurposed into the service of original,
low-res, high-impact electronic music and visuals - sidestepping game culture and instead exploring the technology's
untapped potential and distinctive intrinsic character." http://blipfestival.org/2008/
19
19
hauntology is often used to describe this phenomenon (Dunning and Woodrow 2009). Derrida
coined this term to describe how we are all haunted by ghosts with repressed meanings from the
past, aswell as ideas about the future (1994:10). Hauntology concerns for example the suggestive
and "inadequate" qualities of blurred images and lo-fi sounds. It is the opposite to clear and
instantly understandable texts. If von Trier's Dogma 95 manifesto was a way to create a sense of
"more reality" with raw documentary techniques, the fundamental idea of hauntology is that less
details and comprehensibility opens up for more imagination. If a chiptune is played for a rockmusician and a raver who are also chipmusic connosieurs, the rocker might hear screams and
guitars from the 1970s where the raver hears synthesizers and dance beats of the future. The beeps
are polysemic and offer different interpretations for those who have developed a more refined
understanding of chipmusic; a form of "beep-literacy".
The third approach of essentialism focuses on the materiality of the machines themselves
and not the ghost of them. It is a posthuman ideal type that concerns chipmusic media as music
tools on its own terms, regardless of its current meanings and uses. Every tool has its own set of
limitations and chipmusic media are not necessarily more limited or limiting than others. As the
artist/academic Norman White said: “It is a fundamental mistake to believe that a leading edge idea
requires a leading edge technology” (Debatty 2006). It can be a form of essentialism, where the
chipmusician tries to challenge forth "the true nature" of the technology; its inherent aesthetics. This
approach has a rich history in avant-garde music ever since John Cage used turntables and radios in
the 1950s, but it is a recent tendency in the digital realm. For example, post-digital music (Cascone
2000) is an exploration of failures in software tools. Glitch art similarly explores the aesthetics of
digital errors and artefacts of the machine (Menkman 2010). Chipmusic is often conceptualized in
these terms in the art world20 but it presuppose a human definition of what the technology is
supposed to be; ontopolitics in other words. Posthuman philosophies on the other hand, emphasize
the importance of studying objects in themselves, often referring to Marshall McLuhan's ideas that
the medium is the message. Ed Halter discusses chipmusic as a form of digital materialism and
compares it to how certain film makers have explored the materiality of film and cinema (Quaranta,
2010:70). Chipmusic platforms have unique qualities with its low amount of options and because it
lacks what Kittler calls systems of secrecy (Gane 2005:36). These multiple layers of control
obfuscate the the platform level from reception and operation, and is not as present in chipmusic
media. That means that chipmusic media are also attractive for musicians who want to "be the boss"
20
For example in exhibitions such as Playlist (2010) and Once Upon a Time (2009) and with artists such as JODI,
Jeremiah Johnson and Paul Slocum.
20
of technology by making it do new things. In the interviews, this will be referred to as a
transgression of the medium.
An Internet Methodology
It is a tough academic challenge to research a subculture that you participate in. This doubleposition as researcher and practioner permeated every step of this thesis – from purpose, theory and
history to analysis and final discussion. My background in chipmusic started in the demoscene in
1993. I was working with trackers on the Amiga, and later started to use Commodore 64, Gameboy
and PC. As the chipscene emerged I started to release records and perform live, with a rather
techno-purist focus on maximizing technology. Over the years, I have published nearly 1000 songs
as Goto80 and made about 200 performances.21 I published a chapter about chipmusic in From Pac
Man to Pop Music (Collins 2008c), which prompted me to criticize my own techno-purism from a
more academic perspective. It also influenced me to start the blog Chipflip, where feedback from
readers have influenced the work with this thesis.22
It is difficult to say how this background influences the thesis, particularly due to the lack of
scholarly research on chipmusic to compare with. However, a valid critique would be that I have
studied the aspects of chipmusic that are close to my own experiences. There are no Japanese or
Russian musicians and no informants under the age of 24. The thesis also excludes a number of
popular interfaces and platforms.23 The emphasis on the demoscene and chipscene lacks a
consideration of commercial and independent game musicians aswell as enthusiast forums such as
Battle of the Bits and other Internet sites for tracker musicians.
But the purpose is not to give a representative view of chipmusic as a whole. As a
researcher, the purpose is to write an interesting and coherent text and not to portray a whole
subcultural movement (if that is even possible). I believe that my background drove me to write
something about chipmusic that has not already been said, which hopefully also contributes
something to the grey areas between techno-science and social sciences. In other words, I wanted to
conduct a critical study of chipmusic as a craft with a firm base in the subculture. I believe that the
position of practioner-researcher fits well for such purposes.
21
http://goto80.com
http://chipflip.org
23
Interfaces such as Nanoloop, MCK/MML, Assembly language and MIDI-sequencers in general are perhaps
underrepresented. Platforms like the ZX Spectrum and MSX could have occurred more.
22
21
Since I have published texts before, and publish a blog about chipmusic, it was crucial to
consider that this could influence the answers of the informants. For example, it is plausible that my
critical texts about the techno-centric perspective of chipmusic led some informants to tone down
that perspective in the interviews. I encouraged the informants to give their own views to my
questions and I tried to construct as open questions as possible. For example, I used the term
'features' rather than 'limitations' and intitially asked questions about 'media' rather than specifying
questions about platform or interface.
The Selection Process
Ten chipmusicians were interviewed in the thesis, who will be introduced in more detail in the next
chapter. As a long-time practioner with a reasonable overview of the field, I had a rough idea of
who would be suitable to interview. The selection of chipmusicians was not made to give a general
representation of chipmusic so the sampling aims more towards depth than width (Flick, 2009:123).
Consequently, I did a purposeful sampling of musicians who could answer my questions in a good
way. Variety has been strived for in two aspects. First, in technical terms. The informants all work
with a variety of chipmusic media, which was thought to increase the understanding of common and
specific features.24 The musicians also work on different levels of the media; some of the
informants work very close to the platform itself while others strictly use software interfaces made
by others. Secondly, there was a consideration for a subcultural diversity in the sampling. The
informants are from the demoscene and the chipscene, but there are also two musicians who do not
really belong to neither of them.
The selection is more homogenous in other ways. Chipmusicians in general are
predominantly European or American males, and my selection reflects this distribution. Informants
in the thesis were selected as critical cases and 'good' informants – experienced, knowledgeable,
articulate and reflexive individuals (Flick, 2009:122). Most of the participants are around 30 years
of age, which is probably slightly higher than chipmusicians on average.
About Internet Interviews
In order to emphasize the views of the informants, I designed semi-structured interviews according
to the themes of the thesis. The aim was to create an inclusive atmosphere for the interviews, where
24
C64, NES, Gameboy, Vic20, ZX Spectrum, Amiga, PC, MSX, Sega systems, Atari systems, etc.
22
the informants felt comfortable to bring forth aspects that I had not thought of (Kvale 1997:117). I
also conducted the interviews over a long period of time to establish a context of trust, which Kivits
mentions as important for e-mail interviews (2005:38). This was especially important since the
thesis revolves around personal acts of creativity which not only involves intellectual abilities and
domain-relevant knowledge but also thinking styles, personality traits, and other factors (Lubart
2005). For example, it became clear that some informants needed some encouragement to reflect on
their own process of making music, rather than discussing it in general terms.
E-mail interviews seemed like the best method for the thesis, since e-mail can be a personal
and thoughtful form of communication (Kivits 2005:35). As a researcher, the asychronous dialogue
allows for careful consideration of each question. The participant is given an option to reflect on
their thoughts and experiences in their own pace, since there is no researcher waiting for an instant
answer (Im and Chee 2003). Since the composer can answer the questions in their music studio it
can also promote a retrieval of situated knowledge and memories. Furthermore, since e-mail
interviews occur in digital text format they do not need transcription in the traditional sense. The
transcription that did occur was capitalizations of letters and correction of spelling mistakes and,
more importantly, to translate interviews made in Swedish into English.
A crucial problem with e-mail interviews is the lack of signifiers. Body language and
changes in the voice are not visible in e-mails, which can confuse the communication. Expressions
of irony, humour and hesitation can be misintepreted. This was made more complicated in
interviews with people who do not have English or Swedish as their mother tongue. However, this
caused only a few confusions (for me), perhaps because the informants were used to talk English to
people online.
The Interview Process
I based my method on Kvale’s model of the interview process: thematizing, designing,
interviewing, transcription, analyzing, verifying and reporting (Kvale, 1997:85). The questions were
constructed from four broad themes: background, motives, methods and cultural position. The
questions were not asked the same way for each informant, but followed the flow of the
conversation. In this way, I wanted to have an open-ended and explorative approach to increase my
understanding for chipmusic as an activity (Kvale, 1997:94). I gradually noticed that the e-mail
medium was less suitable for very broad questions ("What motivates you to work with
soundchips?") and required more specificity ("Why do you work with this particular soundchip?").
23
I contacted all the informants over e-mail and explained my project. Since I had met some of
the informants before, I needed to find my own way to balance between the interests of
interviewing, and maintaining a personal relationship with the participants (Kivits 2005:41-43). In
the first contact with the informants, I used a rather formal language to establish 'scientific aura' to
the interviews, which was gradually loosened up. I asked the informants if they wanted to be
anonymous or what name they wanted to appear by in the text.
It was challenging to encourage exhaustive and reflective answers. In the e-mail answers
there was a tendency towards general answers such as "this is limiting" rather than more personal
and specific thoughts. While some informants were encouraged by more specific questions about
their own specific work, others seemed reluctant to discuss their creative processes. This is
understandable, given that it can be difficult to reflect on creative processes, and serves as a result
in itself.
I gradually noticed that if I sent several questions simultaneously, I would get lengthy
replies to each question. Some informants attached their answers as a separate document. But if I
posted only one question, the answers were usually shorter and less formal, and never written in an
external word processor. The answers seemed more spontaneous, like a dialogue instead of an
interview. Perhaps e-mail interviews did not encourage people to speak their mind about their
music, but instead created a sort of pressure of saying the right thing in a research context.
Sometimes it would take several weeks to get answers from the informants. I tried to vary
the amount of questions, thinking that less questions would give quicker answer, but this was not
the case. Usually I waited for 5-10 days until I sent them a friendly reminder, since I did not want to
put pressure on them. However, considering the time frame of the thesis, I asked some of the
informants if they wanted to conduct the interviews as real-time text chats instead. The idea was
simply to get the interviews faster, but it also had the positive effect of creating a more relaxed
atmosphere. With the possibility for instant feedback, the interviews became more similar to faceto-face conversations. It was less formal, and the answers were more straight-forward. Seven
informants were partly interviewed in this way.25
During the analysis of the interviews, I constructed categories for the answers. The main
difference from the design of the questions, was that I did not separate motivation from methods,
since they were usually intimately connected. Most of the categories were rather given from the
theory and questions (for example media aesthetics, nostalgia, control) but others were a result of
the interviews (interface immediacy).
25
These interviews were either carried out through Skype or IRC.
24
Results: Making Chipmusic – and its Significance
The results of the interviews are presented in the first three sections that follow here. They aim to
portray the most common topics of how the informants talk about technology, processes and the
idea of going beyond the system. The first one describes how the musicians think about chipmusic
media. It starts at the platform level and discusses the relationship between the concepts of
hardware and software and continues to focus on the interface, ending with the topic of aesthetics.
The informants describe how they think the aesthetics are constructed, and how they relate to that.
The next section deals with chipmusic as practice, comparing different techniques and ideas
concerning the limitations and possibilities of the media. The section called 'Beyond the System'
shows how the informants speak about ideas of transgressing media and culture. It concerns the
levels of platform and interface, aswell as aesthetics.
In the fourth section, four broader discourses are described as nostalgia, control, hacker
aesthetics and digital economics. In this section the motivations and methods of the musicians are
analyzed more in terms of ideology.
The presentation of the interviews follow the thematic logic of the previous chapters. The
purpose of the thesis is to explain why and how the informants make chipmusic, and to make this
knowledge accessible for the general reader with relevant concepts. While the interviews are not
representative of chipmusicians at large I am confident that I have tried to give a fair impression of
all the participating artists.
Introducing the Musicians
The interviewed musicians are males between 25 and 41 years old from Europe, USA and
Australia. Six of them began making chipmusic in the 1980s and 1990s when they were less than 15
years old. The others started with chipmusic in the 2000s and were 20-25 years old and one was
around 35. They generally have a university degree and work within computers, music or the arts.
Chipmusic is mostly a hobby, although it is intertwined with their occupation for some of them. 26
Alex Mauer is an American lab technician who uses many different platforms for his
chipmusic, and often works with emulators. He always wanted to make music with chipmusic
media, and his music is highly influenced by videogame nostalgia.
26
Patric Catani and Matt Simmonds are professional musicians and Gijs Gieskes works as an artist and sells his homemade low-fi platforms. Little-scale is doing a PhD that involves building chipmusic platforms. Jeremiah Johnson just
finished a second degree and intends to work as a musician/artist.
25
Ed is a Swede who works in an art gallery and is known for his experimental C64-music that
first appeared in the demoscene in the early 1990s. He began making chipmusic as a kid and has not
stopped since.
Gijs Gieskes is a Dutch artist who designs his own hardware and software to make music
and art with. His music often has a noisy and industrial atmosphere to it. He started to make
chipmusic to create sounds for an art project inspired by old videogames.
Jeremiah Johnson (Nullsleep) is an American artist/musician who co-runs the 8bitpeoples
netlabel. He started to make music with chip-like sounds and then became fascinated with the
original hardware. His current music style is centered around misusing technology.
Linus Åkesson is a Swedish programmer who is known for his re-interpretations of classical
works, often programmed in Assembler. His roots is in the demoscene, and he often makes
chipmusic using his own custom-built media.
little-scale, an Australian programmer/composer, builds chipmusic interfaces as part of his
PhD. He likes to make chipmusic to re-contextualize media and work with limitations. His music is
often similar to minimalist composers.
Marc Nostromo (m.-.n) is a Belgian programmer who has designed the LittleGPTracker
software. He was looking for portable music devices, and discovered the Gameboy and LSDj, on
which he based his own software. He has described his music as disco dirt.
Matt Simmonds (4mat) is a British game musician, often credited for inventing the
soundtracker chipmusic. He mainly likes the purity in sound with chipmusic. He is an active
demoscener and also programs his own music tools.
Patric Catani is a German musician who has used chipmusic media since a kid for his
characteristic hardcore dance music and not chipmusic per se. He likes how trackers give quick and
full control and boost his creativity.
Zabutom is a Swedish student who likes how he can move freely within the limitations of
trackers. With his roots in the demoscene, he composes a wide range of melodic music that often
holds some degree of surprise.
Media Aesthetics
The informants' answers about how the media influence the music, is here presented according to
Montfort & Bogost's model of the five levels of digital media (p. 13). It starts with the platform and
its imperfections, which is followed by a presentation of how the concepts of hardware and software
26
relate to eachother for to the informants. The next section deals with the level of interface, where it
was common to discuss the immediacy of chipmusic media. Finally, the question of aesthetics
presents the informants' ideas about how platform, interface and culture have constructed the
concept of chipmusic and how it relates to their own music.
The Authentic Imperfection
"When everything is working as it should what is there to do? The best thing you can do is nothing
so it will keep moving along fine in the same way." (Jeremiah Johnson)
There are errors and unpredictable aspects in chipmusic platforms that have an artistic appeal.
Sometimes it can be subtle, like how the screen of the Sega Nomad console produces a hiss that
gives "a nice level of warmth" (little-scale). Jeremiah Johnson likes the artifacts of the Gameboy,
such as the crude volume envelope or the clicks on the sample channel. Most listeners might not be
aware of these imperfections, but they can be fundamental elements in the composing process.
Little-scale mentions how he worked with a clone of the YM2413 soundchip:
"The harsh tones were only possible because the chip I was using was a cheap clone, which did not
output audio correctly for all instruments and resulted in some crunchy waveforms. This perfectly
imperfect chip is paramount to the aesthetic that I have tried to create with that work, especially from
0:00 to 2:55." (little-scale)27
For Ed, the unpredictable aspects of the platform has been a negative aspect that he wanted to
control. "The drawback of the SID [the C64-soundchip] is that it does not sound perfect all the time.
There are always some 'glitches' and 'lags'". Also, the differences in filters between different C64s
made him use less filters in his songs. He programmed his own software to increase the control,
which will be further dealt with at p. 41.
The imperfections in the platform is often used to legitimize chipmusic as an artistic
practice.28 From that perspective, it is perhaps surprising that the informants did not speak more
about it. This could be due to the lack of specific questions on the topic (since I wanted to see what
importance they ascribed to it themselves). Perhaps it is a fascination that is hard to put into words.
Nevertheless, it is an indication of the importance they ascribe to the platform level.
27
28
The song is available at http://www.iimusic.net/catalog/2009/07/little-scale-dynasty
See for example the reader that accompanied the Playlist exhibition in 2009/2010.
27
Hardware or Software?
The informants discuss the media in terms of hardware and software, which corresponds to the
thesis' use of the terms platforms and interfaces. Chipmusic is usually defined in terms of hardware,
and many of the informants emphasize the role of hardware.
"I love the sound of hardware. [..] Also, I love the idea of writing music with the hardware. To me,
that's the point of all of this, isn't it? [..] I will say that I am indeed more inspired when I know I am
writing with real chips sitting in real consoles, rather than an emulated version. I personally believe
that this is due to more than a (possible) difference between perception of sound quality, and extends
into the realm of psychology" (little-scale)
For little-scale the use of the original platform is paramount to chipmusic. Certain platforms give
certain feelings, just like a violinist might prefer a Stradivarius even if it can be perfectly mimicked
by a modern clone. It is also crucial for his academic work, since he technologies to compose with
the original chipmusic platforms. Gijs Gieskes, who also builds his own technologoies, says that
"when i have an idea it's usually based on the limitations of a device, so the device delivers the
idea.. sort of".
Other chipmusicians use modern computers with emulators, or other tools that sound like
chipmusic platforms. Matt Simmonds says that "hardware's a pain in the ass" and for Alex Mauer
there is not "much of a difference composing with emulated sound versus hearing the hardware
sound unless the emulator is not accurate". Both Simmonds and Mauer are primarily driven by the
love for the sounds and interfaces, rather than the platforms which is common among several other
informants. Influential features for their work is more often identified on the level of software
interface. Perhaps it is because the role of hardware platform is difficult to talk about. "[T]here is
obviously always an influence, but it permeates the work to such a large extent that it is not that the
music is *changed* to fit the technology, but rather that music that wouldn't have fit never would
have appeared in the first place" (Linus Åkesson). It is a materially fixed basis that is difficult to
change, and perhaps therefore not so interesting to reflect upon. Software, however, is easier to
transform and the informants reflect more on its influence on composition.
28
Interface Immediacy
Making chipmusic does not have to be a complex and time-consuming process. On the contrary,
many informants describe how chipmusic interfaces enable a fast-paced work flow. Marc Nostromo
points out that "[o]nce you know the key presses, there's very little time between the moment you
think about something and the moment you do it" . He continues:
"It's like there's a direct connection between your brain and the sound system, the interface is not in
the way of your train of thought. [..] In LSDj type interfaces it takes seconds to know whether or not
it was a good idea. In other types of programs it takes me a few minutes and then I don't feel like
trying the next iteration." (Marc Nostromo)
Jeremiah Johnson says that "purely in terms of composing, there is nothing that I can write with
faster than a game boy and LSDj though". For Matt Simmonds, chipmusic tools offer an instant
gratification that he rarely finds elsewhere. "If I have an idea for something I'll be onto the practical
side almost instantly rather than planning". He often uses trackers to quickly get ideas and melodies
down. He also mentions the escapist qualities that he finds in chipmusic, which Patric Catani also
mentions in the following way: "I really enjoy to dive into 'the zone' and just be focused on writing
and forget the time and everything around me. I hope I never loose that feeling!". It is possible that
a more immediate interface promotes this sense of escapism, or an immersive experience of the
medium (see p. 37).
The informants are all highly experienced chipmusicians, which presumably assists a feeling
of immediacy. If you are used to a medium, you probably developed a quicker work pace. But when
the informants compare chipmusic interfaces to other interfaces they are used to, they still
emphasize its immediacy. "If you've done about 30 seconds all day in Kore [a modern music
software], firing up FT2 [Fasttracker II] and blasting out a whole song in an hour is good. With any
other kind of music it's kinda difficult to get that kind of instant gratification." (Matt Simmonds).
Marc Nostromo thinks that the sense of immediacy comes from a "'limited' amount of parameters
with a wide range of effect and the ninja move keypress that allows to edit really fast. [..] The
workflow in other programs is too slow and doesn't cope well with my 'let's try quickly what would
happen if I did this'".
The mobility of devices such as the Gameboy is appealing to many of the artists, and also
adds to the immediacy of the interface. When a musician gets an idea for a song, s/he can take the
29
Gameboy out of the pocket and have the software running within a few seconds, regardless of
where s/he is. This seems to be qualitatively different even from a small laptop, where size and
booting time can be an obstacle. As Patric Catani says: "[s]tart the program and go is sometimes the
best way".
The immediacy of the interface can promote a sense of working close to the machine,
perhaps even more so than the hardware itself. This raises questions about what chipmusic
aesthetics is, and how it relates to hardware and software respectively.
An Aesthetics of the Machine?
"It's definitely the 'purity' of the sound that I like the most, how you can just concentrate on melody
and so on without having to think about how the instruments will work together, very different to
using real/sampled instruments" (Matt Simmonds)
Matt Simmonds uses sample-based software or emulators to make his music because, as already
mentioned, he thinks that "hardware's a pain in the ass". The primary attraction is the sound, not the
platforms. Alex Mauer, who also works primarily with emulators, says: "I like for computerized
audio to SOUND LIKE its a computer. I'm not interested in todays flashy computer audio options".
Marc Nostromo believes that the defining aspect of chipmusic is found in software rather than
hardware. According to him, the commands and tables were developed to overcome the platforms'
limitations in timbre and polyphony, and that is what led to an aesthetics of chipmusic. Ed and
Linus Åkesson also mention this. Matt Simmonds argues that most chipmusic software have
features that originate in how C64-music developed in the early 1980s.29
These chipmusicians focus on how timbre and interfaces have shaped the aesthetics of
chipmusic. The characteristic timbre of chipmusic is based in "mathematically simple waveforms"
as Linus Åkessson puts it. For him they are fundamental to the genre of chipmusic, but he also
discusses the importance of interface. He recently demonstrated this with the Chipophone - a
vintage organ that he had modified to play chipmusic with. With the Chipophone he could perform
a number of chipmusic classics, because he had incorporated some of the most characteristic
features of chipmusic platforms and interfaces into the organ. It features the classic soundchip
timbres and restrictions in polyphony, it enables the performer to loop short segments of a song and
also transpose them and the user can work with effects such as arpeggio and pitch slides. It is an
elegant demonstration of how platform and interface contributes to the aesthetics of chipmusic.
29
He mentions pitchbend and vibrato, arpeggio, tables for instruments/volumes and a feature for a noise waveform.
30
But as little-scale mentioned earlier, he is more inspired when working with the original
platform. For him, there is a quality that is lost when working with emulators, even if they emulate
the technology completely accurately. He thinks that he composes music differently with the
original platforms. If this is true, it would be reasonable to assume that the general aesthetics of
chipmusic have been affected too. In other words, the aesthetics of chipmusic might have been
different if they were composed in emulators from the start.
Ed discusses the possibility of separating a perceived aesthetics of the machine, and a more
materially based aesthetics.
"Some people enjoy glitchy and quirky rhythms and enjoy that you can produce these kinds of
sounds, while others masturbate to pulsewaves playing schlager-like music. I really don't know
which one of the two would be more focused on getting back to 'the original sound of the machine'
so to say". (Ed)
In other words, the aesthetics of the machine can refer to both media or genre. Typical videogame
pop music can be the aesthetics of the machine, but from a more radical posthuman perspective it
can be argued that the machine has a built-in aesthetics in itself. This will be further addressed in
the following section that explains chipmusic as a practice.
Chipmusic Practices
The previous section focused on the informants' ideas about the media. It is now time to look at
chipmusic as a practice, to see how the chipmusicians talk about the ways that they compose music.
Limitations as Obstacles and Springs
Due to the material construction of chipmusic media and its value as a vintage or obsolete
technology, it is not surprising that the informants reflect on the role of limitations in their music
making. Limitations was an interesting topic for most of the musicians, in relation to for example
interfaces and aesthetics. The term limitation is used in a quantitative sense to refer to a lack of
features in the platform. Timbre and polyphony are of primary concern, but also memory and
31
storage, processor resources and instrumentation is mentioned.30 A common idea is that these
limitations function as a creative boost:
"Limitations are the key to creativity. With too much freedom you don't get anything done, whereas
different rules and obstacles stimulate creativity. It doesn't have to be technical limitations but can
also be about genre, aesthetics, the expected audience reception, deadlines, etc." (Linus Åkesson)
Little-scale was interested in how limitations affected his music writing also before he started to
make chipmusic. For example, he explored the role of sleep deprivation in music making, and also
different ways to control electronic sound with bodily gestures. A combination of sleep deprivation
and so-called physical computing can be described as limited if you compare it to how a well-rested
body can meticulously control every aspect of a complex music interface. But regardless of how
well-rested you are, the amount of possibilities can be overwhelming and "the advantage of the
complex setup can turn into a limitation (sometimes)" (Patric Catani).
Nevertheless, when asked about how the platform affects their music making, the answer is
typically phrased in terms of limitations rather than possibilities.31 In that sense, the choice of
chipmusic media can be seen as a reaction against media that offer 'too much', in opposition to a
universalist idea of digital music. The informants choose chipmusic media because they consider
them to be limited. There is a tendency among the informants to position themselves as underdogs,
which Jeremiah Johnson mentions as a recurring concept for him. Gijs Gieskes says that "When I
have an idea it's usually based on the limitations of a device, so the device delivers the idea.. sort
of." (Gijs Gieskes).
But there is also a more humanistic motivation among the informants. Jeremiah Johnson
says that "[i]n music and in life I feel like I operate best within crisis situations. [Chipmusic] creates
a sense of motivation and offers a 'problem' to be solved (however abstract it may be)". The
problem is, in Ed's words, centered around using "simple means to produce something at almost no
cost at all". Several informants discuss music in terms of resources and costs. Linus Åkesson says
that there are hard limitations (usually in the platform) that are impossible get around, and soft
limitations that are costly to get around. The cost can be digital – such as filesize or processor
power, but also social – like the amount of 'boring' work that is required to overcome the limitation.
The hard limitations are rarely described in positive and empowering terms, but rather as
something that limits their music making. The amount of voices and timbre that is pre-encoded in
30
Linus Åkesson and Patric Catani discuss how the amount of instruments that the user can define in the software is
limiting, while little-scale mentions that the lack of user-defined instruments in the YM2413 soundchip is limiting.
31
It is worth noting, that my questions used the word "feature" instead of limitations.
32
the platform is generally described in negative terms. Limitations are more commonly seen as
positive when it comes to the software interface.
Several informants also develop their own interfaces where they construct the possibilies
and limitations on their own. Ed began to work on a custom C64-software in the late 1990s, driven
by an urge to control the unpredictable aspects of the soundchip. He "wanted to do everything and
more. Unfortunately I ended up in the same shit that I nowadays want to get away from. There was
a screen full of numbers where every column somehow symbolized a possibility". Marc Nostromo
talks about the balance between redundancy and minimalism in the interface. For Nostromo, a tool
should be limited for the sake of efficiency and not because of aesthetics or technology. Linus
Åkesson on the other hand, makes software on modern hardware that simulates what he sees as the
basic characteristics of chipmusic: few waveforms, lo-fi samples and a 3-6 voice polyphony. It is
partly a question of economy, but also "[i]t's fun when technical tricks actually affects the
possibilities that you have when you put your composer's hat on".
To summarize then – there seems to be a love-hate relationship with the media. Jeremiah
Johnson, who has performed with the Gameboy for almost 10 years, says "I've often wanted to just
punch the shit out of the game boy while I'm performing". He is refering to a frustration of trying to
break the control of the interface (p. 45), whereas Zabutom describes the compositional process as a
much less conflicting situation. "I can 'move freely' within the limitations. Only my imagination sets
the boundaries, sort of, compared to when you're limited by what samples or instruments you have
access to". Zabutom seems to have accepted the limitations as an integral or even natural part of the
composing process. Patric Catani says: "Somehow doing music with computers the first thing you
learn or have to learn is to handle computers the way they 'deserve' it". Even if a musician hates the
instrument, s/he has to learn how to work with it and make it do what s/he wants to. The next
section attempts to explain how the informants "play" their media.
Expressive Effects and the Pressure of Patterns
The informants' answers about the compositional process mainly concerned the level of interface.
Even Gijs Gieskes and little-scale, who work very close to the platform level, mainly talk about
interfaces and operation. Ed's answers about the C64 is an exception. He appreciates the platform's
built-in functions to synergize two sounds to produce a third sound.32 He compares it to adding
32
The SID-chip of the C64 offers different kinds of ring modulation and oscillator synchronization.
33
colour filters in Photoshop to a black and white photograph – "The picture is still there but
something has happened to the colours".
The general tendency in the interviews is to discuss how the composing process is affected
by how effects and patterns work in the interfaces. The patterns are the blocks of notes that build up
the tonal composition, as explained at p. 17. Next to the notes is a column where the musician can
put various effects to change timbre, pitch and volume.
Patric Catani thinks that he makes different music in trackers because it offers an easy
access to effects. It is rather effortless to change for example the song's tempo in the effect column,
compared to interfaces where you use the mouse to enter a separate screen to draw envelopes. It
relates to interface immediacy and also encourages a certain aesthetics (as mentioned at p. 18). Matt
Simmonds discusses the role of effects:
"Just like a guitar, piano etc. where you have to co-ordinate your hands to play 'live' and arrangement
approaches to different parts of the song, the effects are the same thing, not only the parameters but
also how the tempo of the tracker influences the 'tick speed' of the effects and so on. There is stuff
you can do to create dynamics, and there are effects that can have negative effects on the music
which you have to compensate for elsewhere, just like playing a real instrument." (Matt Simmonds)
The comparison with hand coordination illuminates the stylistic importance of effects. Effects can
be a crucial way to develop a personal style, given that the sonic spectra of chipmusic media are
constrained, much like a traditional instrument. The effects is important to add an expressive
element to the music. Historically, the use of effects has played an important part in proving ones
skills in a culture of maximalism. The informants also discuss that the influence of the interface.
The effect column is always visible, compared to software where it is tucked away in submenus.
With the effect column in trackers, there is "a direct association with each row, whereas in a
sequencer it is a visually optional association" (little-scale). The constant presence of the effect
column adds to the situation where "a tracker makes it feel like you're right there in the middle of
every step, able to tweak anything" (Matt Simmonds). Patric Catani describes how his music is
affected by the effect handling in hyper sequencers, where an effect refers to a list of instructions to
the platform:
"[Y]ou can make [the sounds] quite complex patterns itself and switch the oscillators from pulse,
triangle, square and noise in one sound [..] and modify it for the next step without using too much
34
memory or resources. [..] I think it transformed my tracker music into much more melodical
evolving psychedelic songs somehow." (Patric Catani)
Having the effects right at the hand has led Catani to work towards a more dynamic sound. Patterns,
on the other hand, can have an opposite influence. Matt Simmonds: "Thinking about it, using
patterns in the trackery stuff is probably a vital part of how they end up sounding. [..] The tracker
stuff (for me) is more 'rigid' in structure I guess compared to doing it in a sequencer". He mentions
how a pattern in a soundtracker bundle all the voices together, whereas they are separate in the
hyper sequencer. A soundtracker seems to make it more difficult to create 'fluid' arrangements
where each voice evolves on its own, since all the voices are bundled together in the same pattern.
However, there seems to be a similar tendency also when using hyper sequencers like LSDj, where
voices can be composed separately. Little-scale: "My MIDI-sequenced stuff is usually made from
material that loops and grows more complex and textured over time. Perhaps my LSDJ stuff is more
sectioned".
Ed was trying to get away from this sectioned and rigid styles of arrangement. He started to
work with the DMC software because he liked how he could separate the voices to create complex
poly-rhythms where a 3/4 beat can be combined with a 7/8 beat for example. In combination with
the synergetic effects of the C64, there is a powerful potential to create dynamic compositions
despite the linear interface. Ed mentions that he often re-uses sounds or loops for many songs and
due to the complex arrangement they can sound very different in a new context.
Linus Åkesson brings up another useful aspect of arranging each voice independently.
Hyper sequencers normally allow the user to transpose a pattern, meaning that the bassline can be
played in C instead of A by changing just one number. "Suppose that I have a bassline in track 1
and some arpeggios in track 2, and both are playing in A-minor. If I want to change to C-major,
then I can transpose the bass to C and the arpeggio to E-minor, and suddently there is a C-maj7". In
a soundtracker this change would have required a lot more, since new patterns would have to be
created, and it would also use more memory.
The way that patterns are constructed is also a creative incentive for some of the informants.
Patterns form a matrix with a fixed amount of steps, compared to modern 'piano roll' software
where notes can be put more arbitrarily. Patterns, in combination with a limited polyphony,
challenges the musician to be creative with the steps that are available. Patric Catani says that "[t]he
lack of space in the 64 step pattern quantization has lead me to find a lot new ways to build beats
and grooves through "squeezing in" as much of moving / evolving elements". There can also a
sense of pressure with the patterns. "A pattern feels to me like a block of time to fill, then there's
35
another one to slot next to it. Whereas piano roll is this big empty road." (Matt Simmonds). Perhaps
this is a remnant from his past in the Amiga demoscene, where soundtracker chipmusic (so-called
mods) were distributed in its original file formats, rather than as recordings. Listeners could see
how the song was composed, so "because a mod is 'source code' when writing them you do feel a
need to show off a bit [..] like taking instrument numbers out and stuff, or putting extra volume
changes in to make it look a bit more complex". He also says "It does 'feel' different though, not just
editing or anything but my mindset for writing the song". This feeling is likely to be a result of both
interface, personal history and culture. For Simmonds, chipmusic has an escapist quality which
makes him create more playful music and produce it more quickly, compared to the professional
music he makes that he describes as more serious. Perhaps the interface is connected with a mindset
of producing music for fun, where the pressure comes from the interface rather than a client that
needs specific music.
It proved difficult to get concrete examples of how the effects and patterns affected the
music making of the informants. In general, it seems that the effect handling is considered to be an
empowering factor, whereas patterns are often discussed in terms of disempowerment. To further
explore the practice of composing, the informants were approached with more general questions
about the process of going from idea to music.
From Idea to Music
The informants were asked if they start their music making with ideas, and if so, how those ideas
influence the choice of medium. The dominant tendency is to "be onto the practical side almost
instantly rather than planning" (Matt Simmonds). Patric Catani states that "[m]ore often I start a
session and see where it could go. [..] So the Amiga or Gp are my jamming tools and they entertain
just as they come". For him, trackers require less planning, because "with the tracker it is all in a
box. The sounds and arrangement are sticked together. Everything you change in [the tracker] is
directly connected" (Patric Catani). Zabutom says that he usually loses his inspiration when he has
transcribed large ideas to the medium because he gets disappointed with the results.
"It doesn't turn out as good as if I would have sat down with a tenth of an idea instead, in some
random tracker, and then built from that using a more natural flow of inspiration. Then it is more like
a communication with the instrument, I guess. Juggling back and forth until a song grows out of it."
(Zabutom)
36
For Ed, this process is permeated by listening to the tones that appear in seemingly atonal
percussive sounds. He composes the melodies from this, changes the percussions, adapts the
melody, and so on. In this way he continuously reconstructs the song in a sort of constructive
hermeneutic circle, which is something that Gijs Gieskes also describes: "I mostly end up changing
songs all the time and stripping parts that I don't like.. ending up with something quite cut up.".
Gieskes also mentions when he modified the Gameboy to run in double-speed. "In
'hui_alla_hakkuh' track, I used a gb classic at 8mhz to to generate extra high freq vibrato.. (@1.12).
This sounded like a tekno sound, so that track ended up a bit gabbery. Hence 'the hardware
influenced the track', sort of." (Gijs Gieskes).33 Little-scale's music is often a consequence of his
PhD where he builds interfaces for soundchips. "The act of me writing chipmusic with them is a
demonstration of that technology in the first place - the idea of the technology is a precursor to the
idea of the composition".
In this sense, chipmusicians build their music in a tight interplay with the medium. Judging
from the interviews, they mostly start composing without an extensive idea. Such an approach can
be encouraged by an immediate interface, especially if you have it in the form of a Gameboy in
your back pocket. However, Alex Mauer seems to have a different approach. He often starts with an
idea which conditions his choice of technology.
"Usually before I make a song I already know what console I want to use, and I already know what
software I have to use in order to do it. [..] Usually, if I come up with a song by hearing it in a dream,
I already know what soundchip is supposed to be used." (Alex Mauer)
So the medium either influences the process of making the music, or the preparatory work with
ideas. An extensive use of the media can cause you to dream about new music that already fits with
the interfaces and platforms. This can be described as an immersion into the media.
Immersion
In new media theory the term immersion is often used to describe how technologies are designed to
create a sense of immediacy by diffusing the distinctions between the user and the technology
(Nechvatal 1999). This type of immediacy can paradoxically increase the distance between the user
and the platform, if the interface is designed to obfuscate the complexities and alternative potentials
of the platform. Here the term is used in a more empowering sense, since chipmusicians are
33
The song is available at http://gieskes.nl/music/?file=gameboy_2003-2005
37
working very close to the level of platform. The ways that they work with and think of interfaces,
platforms, aesthetics and limitations seems to relate to an idea of immersion. Among the informants
there are ideas about immediate interfaces, "purity" in sounds, authentic technologies, imperfect
platforms, and so on. They are going towards the core of the machine. Even when there is a desire
to go outside of the system, there is a need to first understand and explore the foundations of it.
"There are few chip writers who don't also 'work behind the front panel' as it were, of
whatever tool they're using", according to Matt Simmonds who also says that with trackers "[y]ou
are 'right on the metal' as it were, like Assembly." (a low-level programming language). So even if a
chipmusician does not work beyond the direct interface, tracker interfaces still encourage a sense of
immersion.
Immersion is a personal experience that is difficult to explain with only technical terms.
Immersion is more than a rational understanding and adaptation to the characteristics of a medium.
For Patric Catani, trackers have a special kind of groove that he does not find elsewhere. The
existence of this groove is difficult to prove in technical terms, because it is more about a feeling
rather than physics. He talks about LittleGPTracker, programmed by Marc Nostromo also known as
M-.-n:
"M-.-n managed to make the timing or whatever very musical. The Protracker gives me the same
feeling.. It is just going round and you have the feeling of a tape machine or jamming unit rather than
a computer that simulates a music machine ..(?) I really can't exactly explain it. It is more a feeling..
[..] It has a sort of feel as if the machines were built for doing that. Especially the Amiga gives me a
sort of Roland 808 [a drum machine] flavour by times." (Patric Catani)
Little-scale describes how the music he composes is affected by the choice of platform. He has a
similar difficulty in explaining why it is this way, but he mentions aspects such as nostalgia, timbre,
polyphony and the socially constructed aesthetics of the platform.
"I write angrier music with the VCS than I do with other systems. I write more mellow music with
the SEGA Mega Drive than with something else. SEGA Master System always wants to sound
happy (I have to teach it otherwise!!) - I think that last one is due to nostalgia. The above three
examples I think come down to timbre perhaps? Or at least I feel that plays a role. [..] Number of
channels perhaps, and preconceptions of the type of music that the particular console 'should' have
e.g. SEGA Master System with happy, high pitched detuned lead lines." (little-scale)
38
Immersion should be understood as a technosocial process, where preconceptions can be just as
important as what the medium contains. Immersive chipmusic production is a process that involves
personal preferences, ontopolitics and aesthetics. Ed describes how he tried to bring his inspiration
from synth/techno music into his Commodore 64 music for 'Made Measures are Broken'.
"I wouldn't exactly say that the songs were adapted to the C64. Instead, it was a process where the
sounds were given the leeway that they could be given. I wanted to break the limits of what was
possible or atleast explore what was possible, and the idea was never to offer simple solutions. In the
end it was not possible to create the dense soundscapes that I wanted [..]" (Ed)
The immersion seems to involve a sense of conflict between the media and the user. It is a process
that requires a very active human involvement that, in Heideggerian terms, brings forth a
slumbering shape of the technology. It is not the kind of immersion where electrodes are connected
to your brain to produce music. The chipmusicians battle with their aesthetic preconceptions about
the medium and try to find new ways in the interface. Zabutom discusses how the LSDj-interface
affects his works. "Even if I try to get outside of it sometimes, it can also be nice to embrace it". In
other words, immersion works together with transgression, which is the topic of the next section.
Going Beyond the System
As opposed to immersion, there is a will among the informants to transcend the contexts that they
work in - both material and cultural ones. The chipmusicians rarely talk about overcoming the
limitations on the platform level, though. As little-scale says somewhat ambiguously: "Technical
limitations are absolute (?) without hardware modification". He continues:
"I've written music that you wouldn't expect to come from a particular console or chip, perhaps, but
this is not the same as going beyond something from a technical point of view I suppose. [..] Maybe
I would say that chipmusic breaks perceived limits by pushing people to delve deeper into what is
and isn't technically possible". (little-scale)
This statement contradicts the popular idea of chipmusicians as hackers that push or even overcome
the limitations in the soundchips. It focuses on the ideas about the platforms rather than its physics.
For several informants it is important to try to achieve sounds that have not been heard
before. Making new sounds is, as Jeremiah Johnson puts it, "generally part of the idea". For Ed it is
39
a motivation to "bring forth something that has not been used much" and for him that has been
necessary to be able to continue to work with the technologies. The experienced demoscene
musicians especially emphasize this aspect (Zabutom, Linus Åkesson, Ed), perhaps because
demosceners were always focused on pushing the limits of technology (p. 8). Matt Simmonds is an
exception, though. He has been a demoscene chipmusician for more than 20 years but does not
discuss new tricks with sounds as an important drive for him.
The level of software interface is more commonly discussed when it comes to going beyond
the system. Zabutom often tries to challenge himself by "working outside the restrictions" of the
interface. This is about making the software do something that it does not do very well. For
example, he might use very quick tempos in LSDj which can make the interface unstable and it
encourages a different way of working with the program.34 Also, he has worked with alternative
rhythms instead of the the default time signatures of LSDj.35 It is a way to break your personal
routines and "to turn around the ways in which I was using them" as Jeremiah Johnson puts it. He
expands on his will to overcome his personal routines:
"[A]fter using the same software / instrument for many years you develop certain routines and then it
becomes easy to do the same shit over and over, just in different ways. On one hand this is how
artists develop their 'sound' I guess, on the other it's how shit gets boring. So I've been actively trying
to break the routines that I've developed over the years." (Jeremiah Johnson)
For him, that involves "playing with encouraging accidents and misusing software", which is also
apparent in his visual art works such as Eat Shit.36 The idea of misusing software assumes that there
is a right way to use the software. While this can be an individual conception, there is also a more
collective understanding of it. As chipmusicians are influenced by the tricks of other musicians and
read manuals and tutorials, a broader idea of an intended use is constructed. Since chipmusic was
designed to control unreliable platforms efficiently, the intended use of chipmusic software has
been centered around control. When Jeremiah Johnson talks about "misusing software" then, it
involves a rebellion against that system and attempts "to inject some chaos into things. And give up
some of the control." (Jeremiah Johnson). Since each channel on the Gameboy has specific
characteristics (like the NES described on p. 15), Johnson can for example move the drum patterns
to the melody channel, and therefore achieve something highly unpredictable as the drums are
34
For example, in very fast tempos, a song arrangement function in LSDj could be used as an instrument editor instead.
Since the pattern editor uses 16 steps, it can be difficult to work with other time signatures than 4/4. It is possible to
make pattern breaks, but can cause a visually confusing appearance.
36
http://www.imal.org/playlist/artworks/18
35
40
played with the sounds intended for a melody. Put differently, it is difficult to surprise yourself with
trackers so these kinds of methods become a way to get out of a perceived expected use.
Linus Åkesson discusses a number of tricks that he uses create the illusion that the medium
can do more than it actually can. For example, when there is a limited amount of instruments
available, he can use one instrument with different effects to make it seem like several ones.37 Alex
Mauer also mentions how the C64 can be used to create an illusion of having more channels than it
does.38
Some chipmusicians also hack the software to change its features. Ed changed the code of
the DMC software to manipulate its form/function. In this way, he could achieve a higher degree of
control over the C64's soundchip. He wanted to overcome the inherent artifacts of the SID-chip and
create clearer sounds and less glitches. However, the music that Ed produces is often highly
experimental and "noisy" - far from pop music or videogame music. He thought that "if I can
control it I can also create disturbances if it's relevant" (Ed). He wanted to achieve a higher degree
of control to be able to create better forms of non-control. Compared to Nullsleep's use of interface
then, Ed's approach is even more geared towards a form of manual non-control, or determined
indeterminancy.
But Ed also says that as a musician, he does not want to dig too deep into the technology,
because "still, it has to be possible to create music and not only explore the technology" (Ed). Littlescale, who also composes rather experimental chipmusic, discusses the interplay of creating
interfaces and composing music as well. Like Ed, his music can be quite experimental which is why
he was asked if he is driven by doing the unexpected in his music.
"I am not trying to make something out of the ordinary; just inspired by the possibilities. 'You Can't
Change The World' was written on the same day that I made an Atari POKEY interface. That's a
good example, because I was simultaneously trying out the mapping, writing music, and then
refining the mapping as a result of using it in composition." (little-scale)
Most of the other informants are however driven by a challenge of doing 'something different'.
Especially the demosceners seem to be motivated by making something different from the majority.
As Zabutom puts it: "I'm trying to compose music that doesn't sound like everything else, of course.
C64 [demo]scene music is rather conformative sometimes". It is particularly the musicians who
37
One instrument can sound like several ones by playing it in high or low registers (ie, bass and melody), short or long
notes, changing the amount of vibrato or altering the pulse-width.
38
"There's the fact that C64 has variable wave shapes... so you can arpeggiate wave shape to create the illusion that you
are using a 4th channel for noise yet it's only within 3 channels." (Alex Mauer)
41
make their own interfaces and platforms who focus on creating something unique on the level of
culture rather than media. One clear example is a quote from Marc Nostromo, who programs his
own chipmusic interface but completely dismisses the idea of going beyond a technological system:
"I do music to do music that I feel is interesting. By taste I'm going to go towards things that have a
distinct character. But from my point of view all the cyberhacker talk is just BS [bullshit]. People use
it because it's a nice way to get media attention. 99% of people that are shown a gameboy doing
music think 'it's cool' , not 'I'm going to push the limit and do a revolution'." (Marc Nostromo)
The ideas of going beyond technological and aesthetical system is rather prominent in the
interviews. This leaning towards an individual self-realization is quite the opposite to the previous
section about immersion, where the individual is part of the system. It is exactly such ideological
matters that will be addressed further below.
Chipmusic Discourses
So far it has been shown that the informants tend to discuss interfaces, and that there is a desire to
move towards the core of the machine, and also go beyond it. There were two aspects that were
surprising in the interviews according to my previous expectations. First, the scarce amount of talk
about technical details in general and secondly, the lack of talk about pushing the platform to its
limits. This section describes four discourses that were constructed from the interviews. Antinostalgia can be seen as a reaction against the popular understanding of chipmusic as an example of
nostalgia. The other discourses also concern motivation, but lean more towards methods. The
omnipresent control is expanded on, which leads to the discourse of hacker aesthetics where the
ideological aspects are made more explicit. Finally, the discourse called digital economics is an
attempt to relate chipmusic to other practices that discuss their work in terms of limitations.
Anti-Nostalgia
So far the results have not dealt with the topic of nostalgia. Most of the informants state that their
childhood memories influences their music in some way, and for Alex Mauer it is even a primary
motivation.
42
"I am motivated to work with soundchips mainly by the fact that I always wanted to create music
with this particular sound since childhood. Being able to do something I always wanted to do from a
young age never gets old to me. [..] I constantly make referrences to things from my younger years
in my music... from the song names... to moods... to getting a vibe of a specific game that i liked...
[..] The years that I would like to travel back to the most is between 1985 to 1995." (Alex Mauer)
For the other informants however, the idea of nostalgia is handled with more care or even refuted.
Matt Simmonds says that his chipmusic is more playful and less serious than his other music. "I
don't think it's a nostalgic or retro feeling as such, more like escapism. [..] In some ways we all want
to stay young and chipmusic is my way of doing that I guess". In general, he believes that it is the
context that makes chipmusic nostalgic. If it is used in a Gameboy game it is set in a nostalgic
environment and interpreted as such, but put along side "real" music it is more likely to be an
anomaly due to its specific timbre, and not nostalgic per se.
Linus Åkesson discusses how chipmusic went from a technical necessity to aesthetical
preference. He compares it to how the biological limitations of a solo piece for violin in the 17th
century formed an aesthetics that is still used today, despite the possibilities of modern recording
and performance technologies. "[A]esthetics and tradition codifies a limitation that is no longer
unavoidable. This is fundamentally different from nostalgia, because chipmusic is a living genre"
(Linus Åkesson).
Little-scale: "I grew up playing video games from the 80s and 90s. However, to me this is
not an explanation at all why I make music with sound chips etc". For him it is about limitations
and using non-musical technologies. But he also says that "[p]erhaps my favourite console to use is
the SEGA Master System - I am somewhat ashamed to say that this system does have nostalgic
value for me as well as musical value :P".
Chipmusicians tend to avoid describing their music in terms of nostalgia. There are several
plausible reasons for this, where the most obvious one is that the word seems to hold negative
connotations of a naive and reactionary idealization rather than creative uses. It is also likely to be a
reaction to the common understanding of chipmusic as an act of nostalgia.I know from my own
experiences that as a chipmusician, nostalgia and old videogames is something that you are
frequently forced to relate to in interviews.
Ed explains his relationship to the past more explicitly in terms of hauntology. "Instead of
the nostalgic approach to childhood memories I never really left them. Rather, I found new
meanings in the music that I liked. The current zeitgeist colours my view of the past, and I'm
constantly looking for something else" (Ed). It is a form of cultural immersion and transgression,
43
where new things are extracted from what is already there in order to find 'something else' - a new
perspective, sound, interface or context. This is fundamentally different from nostalgia, in the sense
that it moves forward. The way that it moves into the system to extract something new, can be
compared to contemporary political activism. Instead of throwing dirt into the machinery, it
infiltrates it and changes its functions and meanings from within (compare with abstract hacktivism
(Palmås and Busch 2006)).
Chipmusic was created and is haunted by previous ideas and uses of the media: arpeggios
and beeps, videogame complements and various conceptions about what the platform is able to do.
This ghost that haunts chipmusic risks to reduce chipmusic to videogame romantics but on the other
hand, the same ghost also enables the musicians and others to talk about chipmusic in more political
terms of technological re-appropriation. Since there is a wide-spread idea that chipmusic media are
not intended to play music, contemporary chipmusicians can more easily achieve a political and
artistic legitimacy even if they do almost the same thing that chipmusicians did in the 1980s, if only
in a different context. In short - if chipmusic is explained as a re-appropriation, it is bound to
receive more attention than if it is presented as something that was done 30 years ago already.
This discourse is an anti-nostalgia because it exists only on the grounds of what nostalgia is.
By using this discourse, chipmusicians are able to legitimize chipmusic as a musical and artistic
practice. It is interesting that chipmusicians' choice of media is often understood as nostalgia when
a guitarist's preference for old amplifiers is not. One explanation for this is that digital media are
made obsolete a lot more quickly than other electronic media. Another explanation is that there is
rather little understanding of digital media as creative tools. It seems likely that as time goes by,
chipmusic can be understood as a practice that is explained neither as nostalgia or re-appropriation.
The following discourses are more concerned with the materiality of the machines, and how the
informants think about these qualities, starting with the concept of control.
Control
"If I really think about it: TOTAL CONTROL!!". This is what Patric Catani answered when I asked
him if trackers offer more control than other music interfaces. This is not surprising considering that
chipmusic interfaces have been conditioned by a need to control the platform as efficiently as
possible. In their attempts to make new things with the media, control is a crucial element. Littlescale was asked if control has something to do with his fascination for soundchips:
44
"I like to control them, but no I don't think so. My original interest lies in the ability to recontextualise something for creative purposes - in this case, obsolete video game technology. But a
part of the context is creative use, and in order to be able to use it efficiently, one must have
complete control. So maybe the answer is yes after all..." (little-scale)
The quote shows that control can be an underlying concept that musicians are unaware of. The
extensive degree of control has become a naturalized part of chipmusic interfaces, and trackers in
particular. In order to explore the authentic imperfections of the hardware to create something
unpredictable or out of control, as little-scale mentioned on p. 27, it can be useful to avoid trackers.
Jeremiah Johnson describes trackers as "very inherently ordered systems at every level and in LSDJ
especially there are these hierarchical levels of control. So it's a difficult system to 'break' really".
He enjoys this challenge though, instead of using other software39 where "you can create a mess
without even trying" (Jeremiah Johnson). The meticulous and manual control that trackers offer
means that it is challenging to create something that appears to be random. As Ed mentioned on p.
41, more control leads to more possibilities to disturb the sounds and perhaps that makes it more
difficult to make something unpredictable.
Other chipmusicians, such as little-scale and Gijs Gieskes, build their own interfaces to
create music and noises that sound quite different from most tracker music. They have both worked
with generative music, where algorithms create or manipulate sounds and music, and alternative
physical interfaces where chip sounds can be controlled with bodily movements for example. While
the resulting music would be possible to create manually with a tracker, it is rare to hear such music
made in trackers. Glitchy and generative music was rarely heard in demos or videogames, but has
become more popular in the chipscene during the past few years.
It seems that chipmusic interfaces work in accordance with Mathews universalist ideas of
computer music - of making "everything" possible, considering the platform at hand. In that sense,
chipmusicians who want to put the media out of control are not subverting the platform level as
much as the levels of interface and reception/operation. If a chipmusician manages to produce the
most chaotic noises ever, that is not to say that it puts any stress on the platform level. Perhaps it is
merely doing what it is told to do by the interface. Also, the cultural conditions of chipmusic have
traditionally assigned much value to technical competence, which seems to presuppose a large
degree of control. This is perhaps not so different from how musicians are valued in general. A
competent musician knows how to combine theory with practice. Zabutom and little-scale both
briefly mention that there are some soundschips that they do not know well enough to be good at it.
39
He mentions MCK/MML
45
In other words, theory can offer an increased sense of control, and control enables the competence
that is important for a craft, also to put it out of control. Chipmusic is permeated by control, from
the level of code and interface to the operation and aesthetics. This is the topic of the next
discourse: hacker aesthetics.
Hacker Aesthetics
The way that chipmusicians talk about their work is similar to the term hacker aesthetics that Daniel
Botz (2008) uses to describe the demoscene. The idea is not to find the best suitable medium for a
pre-defined task, but to find the best task of a specific medium. It was shown earlier that the
informants generally do not choose media according to a specific purpose or idea. Hacker aesthetics
involves a process of delving into the medium to test unorthodox methods. The medium is hacked
to make it do things that were thought to be impossible or atleast very difficult. In the context of
digital media, this concept developed in the early hacker cultures of the 60s and 70s, which was an
ideological mish-mash of capitalist commerce and utopian counter-culture that Barbrook and
Cameron has called the californian ideology (1995). It helped to develop an idea of an individual
computer user that could distance themselves from the medium and invent new uses for it (in the
dream of a better world).
The interviews have shown that this individualist way of thinking exists among the
chipmusicians. There is a desire to go beyond the system, be it material or aesthetic. This can be
considered as a common trait in the Western individualist cultures that the chipmusicians live in,
and as such it is not surprising. However, the informants also discuss the features of the media in
terms of limitations rather than possibilities. In other words, they do not see themselves as
autonomous masters of technology who can invent new things. None of the informants claim to be
able to go beyond the platform. Linus Åkesson has worked with the ATmega-platform to simulate
chipmusic in its limited capacities and he says:
"I suppose I broke new grounds with 'the hardware chiptune project' [..]. But looking back at it, it
doesn't seem as advanced, since I've pushed the limits of the ATmega-platform since. It mostly
concerns technical advances then, and not musical ones." (Linus Åkesson)
Perhaps chipmusic's long history of overcoming limits in the media has led to a humble attitude
among chipmusicians about the supposed rigidity in media features. An example of this is how
little-scale in 2009 managed to play an equally tempered tonal scale with the Atari 2600, which had
46
never been done before in the console's 32 years of existance. Still, he does not consider this as
going beyond the system because he used a clever trick instead of finding a more hardcore and
complicated solution.40 He merely says that "I'm a cheater :P". As already mentioned, he thinks that
chipmusicians push perceived limitations since "technical limitations are absolute (?)" (little-scale).
This relates to how Foucault discusses the term transgression. The strive for acting ‘outside
the box’ is an important ideal in society at large, according to Foucault:“Perhaps one day
[transgression] will seem as decisive for our culture…as the experience of contradiction was at an
earlier time for dialectical thought.” (Foucault & Bouchard, 1977:33). Regardless if the
chipmusicians' claim of novelty refers to aesthetics, media or culture, we should not understand
transgressive production as something that transcends limits and creates a vacuumed state of
freedom. For Foucault, when boundaries are exceeded, it illuminates the limits of the system and
completes them (Jenks, 2003:7, Simons, 1995:67). So when new sounds are produced with
chipmusic media, it fills perceived gaps in the materiality and enhances the actual potentials of the
medium. But by refining the definitions of the system it also makes it more difficult for other
chipmusicians to transgress the system. Transgression has a by-product of reducing the headroom
for future experiments; it is a simultaneous expansion and contraction of the medium. In that sense,
the long history of media transgression in chipmusic has paradoxically led to more limitations in the
media. The strive towards transgression has saturated chipmusic, and made it difficult to transgress
the materiality.
The interviews suggest atleast three ways to go forward from this situation: changing the
individual process, creating new interfaces or using additional tools. Jeremiah Johnson focuses on
misusing the tools from an individual point of view to change his personal process of making
music, as shown earlier. Other musicians, such as little-scale, build their own interfaces to step
away from the discourses of trackers and manual control. As Ed puts it:
"Meeting a music program which aesthetical form looks more like a calculator from the 19th century
- like a deciphering machine with only a lot of numbers or a punch card data machine - is in one
respect as fascinating as it is idiotic. There are many ways to represent sound information and
composition." (Ed)
He discusses alternative representations such as visualizing music with cubes that can be rotated to
change the sounds. Such a representation, he argues, could encourage a videogame-like way of
40
He used the DAC-mode of the soundchip, which is normally used to play samples, to generates squarewave
sounds in specific tones. In this way, he created an illusion of having refined the tonal scale of the squarewave channel.
More hardcore solutions, perhaps, can be found in tlr's equally tempered Vic-20 music called 'Datapop!'
47
playing with music by turning cubes to change the sound. Even if such an interface would not be
able to actualize all the potentials in the platform, it would be able to create new kinds of music by
encouraging a different kind of experimentation. "[M]usic editors are probably better if they are
limited compared to if there is are settings for everything" (Ed). Note that this idea is the complete
opposite to his approach when programming his own interface ten years ago (p. 33).
The third approach is to complement the original media with other tools to work towards
new sounds and music. Little-scale for example, builds hardware that enables him to control the
platforms from his modern Apple laptop. This enables him to work with piano roll sequencing and
generative compositions, but still maintain the feeling of working with the original platform. Gijs
Gieskes often solders knobs onto the medium itself to manipulate the sounds for example by
changing the electric current at certain places in the medium. The most popular way to complement
the original medium is to use emulators. There is software for modern computers that mimic the old
media and add extra functions that the original medium does not have.41 It makes the composing
process more convenient in many ways. Also in the demoscene many composers and programmers
rely on the features of emulators to transgress the original medium. The pressure to transgress, in
combination with convenience, has led to a situation where transgressive productions more
commonly involve the use of emulators than not. The original medium then, is no longer the
primary means for production but merely holds the basic framework that musicians have to adapt
to. The question that arises is why musicians insist on using the original machines instead of
working with other technologies.
"I don't know. There is nothing that motivates doing it on a C64 anymore. And maybe that is what's
becoming more and more obvious. Perhaps it's about preserving a cultural heritage, something that
have been part of your personality and everyday life for such a long time that you would be
incomplete without it." (Ed).
In a way, the hacker aesthetical idea of maximizing the platform is not so different from Mathews'
univeralist ideas of digital music. The problem is that while Mathews' dreams are fueled with new
technology on a continuous basis, chipmusicians have used the same media for ages. Have
chipmusicians reached the end of the road of transgression? Although media can be re-defined and
re-purposed, there is still a physical base that is finite and cannot be expanded into eternity. There
are, somewhere, very real limits that can be reached and after 30 years of transgressions those limits
41
An emulator can simulate more RAM, CPU and storage during the production process and also offer a number
of tools to make programming and composing more convenient.
48
are probably very close to being fully defined. Perhaps this is also why the informants did not
discuss the platform level to a large extent.
The alternative to transgression is immersion, which is also an aspect of hacker aesthetics.
Indeed, the informants who use the original platforms are less concerned with going beyond it, but
that does not mean that they necessarily immerse into their media. It has been shown that what is to
be considered as inherent features is partly a (social) construction. In the most extreme case, the
idea about an aesthetics of the machine is merely a consequence of the dominant uses in the past.
The informants who discuss their music making in terms of immersion, are immersing into the
media according to their own ideas about it. For Catani it is like using a drum machine or tape
machine, and for Simmonds it is about being at the metal of the computer. But does that make it
immersion?
Which methods and motivations are to been as immersive and transgressive respectively, is
dependent on assumptions of what the media is and what is intended to do: ontopolitics. If
chipmusic media are defined as 'passive' entertainment commodities, then chipmusic is
transgressive per se. If they on the other hand are defined as musical instruments, then most
chipmusic should be seen as immersive. Such ontological questions were not explicitly discussed in
the interviews. Considering the general focus on interfaces among the informants, media
ontological questions would probably not have been very interesting for them though.
But something that seemed to be interesting and important for all the informants, was the
concept of limitations. This is perhaps the most pervading discourse of the interviews, and appeared
in almost all the aspects of the thesis. The next section explains this discourse further.
Digital Economics
The preference of working with a limited amount of resources is what has characterized chipmusic
ever since the term was made popular around 1990. It can be a challenge to maximize the potentials
despite the technology, or an emancipatory situation to be creative because of the technology.
Chipmusicians are by no means alone in this fascination; similar economic motivations are
important for a wide variety of artistic practices. In a way, it is important for most artistic practices
to do as much as possible with the tools and media that you have. But for chipmusicians these
limitations are emphasized as a crucial element in their motivation and the methods. In that sense it
is similar to practitioners of minimalist music and art, brutalist architecture, pixel graphics, various
forms of poetry or comic strips. It involves a choice to restrict the palettes, amount of notes,the,
amount of words and images, resolution, materials, etcetera. There is an idea to identify the
49
limitations of an expressive tool, aesthetics, medium or method, to be able to focus on what it is
good at.
By limiting the amount of expressive elements, the artists make themselves "poor". This
idea was used in an Italian art movement in the 1960s known as arte povera, which can be seen as a
reaction to the popular dematerialized art forms such as conceptual art and pop art at the time. A
Swiss curator said: "Arte Povera designates a kind of art which, in contrast to the technologized
world around it, seeks to achieve a poetic statement with the simplest of means" (ChristovBakargiev 1998:226). They "reached back through materialism and empiricism towards an idea of
‘natural beauty’, a ‘determined indeterminacy’." (ibid.). In a similar way, chipmusic can be
described as a renewed consideration for materiality when digital music usually works with a
materiality that is obfuscated from the musicians and the listener. The natural beauty for
chipmusicians is found in the digital materiality that they grew up with, which has now become one
of "the simplest of means" in digital music. Furthermore, both movements has evaded a distinct
style although they can be defined in terms of materials and methods. If chipmusic is studied
beyond its characteristic timbre it is a very diverse field which holds both meditation music and
furious punk noise. It is nearly impossible to identify common aesthetical traits (although this thesis
was an attempt do so). As such, both arte povera and chipmusic can be seen as difficult to place in
the context that they worked in. A fundamental difference between the two movements is that
chipmusic continues to be permeated by the idea of individual control, whereas arte povera moved
away from such ideals.
The idea of the individual as a rational being in chipmusic has some similarities to the
'economic man' as he appears in political economy. Chipmusicians want to take charge of a system
to maximize a limited set of resources with techniques of rational control. This is why the term
digital economics is a suitable concept to describe the popular motivations, methods and ideologies
that surround chipmusic. The economic man can also be identified within the digital media. The
way that interfaces are programmed to work with the most rational ways to maximize the platform,
is also a form of economic man. The platform level can also be described in terms of economics: it
was designed to be as cheap and as possible while still being efficient enough for a broad
commercial market.
The ontopolitical assemblage of chipmusic - constituted by platform and interface,
musicians and their methods and motivations, the culture with its aesthetics and ideologies - can be
seens as a big economic man-machine.
50
Final Discussion
There are two ideological tendencies in the results that seem to support ideas of liberal capitalism.
First, the tendency to describe chipmusic media as limited reproduces the belief that new
technology is always better. Secondly, the informants' focus on individual creativity can reinforce a
liberal distinction between man and machine as two clearly distinguishable entities.
However, looking back at the interviews I think that perhaps I would have answered the
questions in a similar way. Despite all the literature I have read about posthumanism and critical
media theory that focuses on what happens beyond or in between the dualism of subject and object,
it is difficult to reflect on my own chipmusic in such academic ways. Even if it is fascinating to
think about the feedback that happens between me and the medium, I still think of myself as being
in charge and getting the job done.
This is likely to be a conditioned by culture. The fact that me and the informants think about
chipmusic media in terms of limitations is a consequence of a hi-tech culture, where new
technology needs to be seen as better to justify The Progress. If there was just an individual and a
medium, there would be few reasons to talk about limitations. S/he would just as easily have talked
about the possibilities of chipmusic media, as some people certainly would have done in the 1980s.
Maybe the potential for immersion in chipmusic media would have been emphasized more.
I think Foucault makes a good point in saying that transgression is decisive for our time. We
are conditioned to think more about our individual desires rather than where they come from, and
why. I think that this is true especially for digital media, since they are often solid systems that are
very difficult to change. There is rather little knowledge about how the actual materiality in digital
media can influence our lives, perhaps because we would not know what to do about it anyway.
Perhaps this explains why the informants talk more about interfaces than platforms. The interfaces
have "softer" limitations which are easier to observe, study and manipulate, and is therefore more
relevant to consider as part of the creative process. It enables a sense of individual control.
Regardless of the motivations of the chipmusicians, their methods and choice of media has
an inherent political aspect. They are working with the fundamental building blocks of digital
culture, and show that "obsolete" media are still highly useful media. Studies of this is important for
understanding the limitations and potentials also in contemporary digital media. What does it (not)
do, and given enough time, what could it do?
But perhaps even more importantly, it can be used to influence the global dispersion of
digital technologies. While chipmusic media are considered as primitive tools of the past according
51
to postindustrial ontopolitics, the situation is different elsewhere. Playpower is a foundation that has
developed an 8-bit computer as an educational tool that sells for ten US dollars. It is aimed at
developing regions where typing skills can make a person earn one dollar per hour instead of per
day (Lomas, Douglass, and Rehn 2008)⁠ . Several chipmusicians, including myself, have
contributed to this project that hopefully can help people all over the world to express themselves
through digital music. After all, on a global scale, most people have not been able to compose their
own digital music and would perhaps be as thrilled about it as the postindustrial world was in the
1980s, and, of course, the chipmusicians still are. A global dispersion of chipmusic media could
also serve as a fresh breath of air for a music style that has been heavily conditioned by Western
conceptions about music.
This thesis has developed a few concepts to describe what happens between a musician and
the fundamentals of digital media. Maybe it can be an inspiration for social scientists to
complement studies of uses with a consideration for the materiality, and also increase the
consideration for cultural aspects in studies of digital creativity in general.
52
Glossary
Arpeggio A quick change between several notes to simulate a chord
Assembler Low-level programming language, very close to the machine.
Glitch A (perceived) error in a technological system
Hyper sequencer A tracker where numbers point to tables of numbers
LSDj Little Sound DJ, a Gameboy tracker software from 2001
MCK/MML A text-based programming language to make music
MIDI A communication protocol for synthesizers, also used in most modern music software
Netlabel An online music label – a popular way of distributing chipmusic
Pattern The part of the tracker where the musician sets notes and effects
Piano Roll A popular style of music sequencers that works similar to note sheets
Soundtracker A tracker that works somewhat like a note sheet
Tracker The most popular type of music software among chipmusicians
Transpose To change the pitch of a number of notes by a constant interval
Waveform A specific timbre found for example in soundchips
53
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Web pages mentioned in the foot notes
http://8bitcollective.com/faq
http://chipflip.org
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timbaland_plagiarism_controversy
http://gieskes.nl/music/?file=gameboy_2003-2005
http://goto80.com
http://www.iimusic.net/catalog/2009/07/little-scale-dynasty
http://www.imal.org/playlist/artworks/18
http://www.micromusic.net
http://www.musikhuset.se/galor/grammisgalan.2003.1.htm
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