Kenneth B. McAlpine - Bits and Pieces: A History of Chiptunes

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: McAlpine, Kenneth B., author.

Title: Bits and pieces : a history of chiptunes / Kenneth B. McAlpine.

Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018001620 | ISBN 9780190496098 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780190496104 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780190496135 (oxford scholarship online) | ISBN 9780190496128 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Video game musicHistory and criticism. | ChiptunesHistory and criticism.

Classification: LCC ML3540.7 .M33 2018 | DDC 781.5/4dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018001620

For Shonagh, Wee Kenny, and Iona

an episode of the animated series Hey Duggee. Broadcast on CBeebies, the BBCs television station for younger children, the show revolves around the Squirrel Club, a Scout-like organization for young animals run by an avuncular brown dog.

As my children became absorbed by the characters quest to preserve a basket of overripe fruit, I decided to put in a spot of quality second-screen time with the iPad in my lap, until, that is, I heard the familiar chirp of 8-bit-style music drifting from the screen. I looked up to see Duggee and the Squirrels assume the roles of Donkey Kong and Mario as the cartoon transformed into a take-off of Nintendos arcade classic, while my daughter, who normally prefers tactile play with an impossibly proportioned blonde doll, pointed at the screen excitedly, yelling, Daddy! Daddy! Listen: Its Mario music!

Any doubts I might have had about the currency of 8-bit music as a pop culture reference vanished in that moment. Music that works as a cutaway gag in a show aimed at four-year-olds is part of, or very near to, the mainstream.

The word chiptune has a wonderful, almost onomatopoeic quality to it; two short affricate syllables in quick succession that bring to mind the chirps of the microchip-based sound hardware of the home computers and video game consoles of the late 1970s and early 1980s. For those of us who grew up playing on that hardware, that sound has a definite nostalgic appeal. It was the sound of our childhood, a repetitive electronic soundtrack that was as much a backdrop to teenage life as were Iron Maiden and Depeche Mode.

Certainly, it was a nostalgic wink towards parents that Grant Orchard, the director of Hey Duggee, intended.on many levels to engage and amuse parents just as much as children. The look and feel of the show shares many of the characteristics of those early 8-bit games, with flat, distinctive characters, and planar environments that that work without the need for any complex backstory. As the episode came together, Orchard thought that the gag just seemed like a good fit. A chase scene involving a monkey and basket of fruit? What else but Donkey Kong?

My daughters reaction, though, suggests that there is something more than nostalgia at work, something about the music that transcends its video game roots. Just like the trend for retro gaming, which has been embraced by kids too young to have been born when that first generation of 8-bit machines was already obsolete, that 8-bit sound has currency with a new breed of musician through the chipscene, a vibrant lo-fi musical subculture that repurposes obsolete gaming hardware to make music.

That inventive repurposing of video game hardware and its embodied performativity distinguishes the contemporary chipscene from contemporary video gaming and aligns it more, perhaps, with other countercultural artistic movements, including alternative media, antiart, and punk, but ever since it emerged as part of the Amiga music scene in the late 1980s, the term chiptune has always applied to a broad range of perspectives, approaches, styles, and sounds.

Even today, several diverse communities of practice exist, perhaps not all mutually exclusive, but certainly distinct, who, quite legitimately, self-identify as chip musicians, and whose approach to music making extends from low-level performance coding on old-skool hardware through to the reinterpretation and live performance of classic video game scores by 8-bit cover bands.

As an exercise, I often set my students the task of trying to arrive at a concise form of words that captures our shared notion of what music is. To their credit, they work hard, but in truth, it is an exercise in futility. Often, they arrive at definitions that are too restrictive and that exclude examples about which, by consensus, we all agree, or they focus on process to the exclusion of form, or vice versa. Attempting to unpick the definitions and broaden their scope usually dilutes them, often to the point of banality, demonstrating, perhaps, Martin Mulls comic adage that writing about music is like dancing about architecture.

Trying to do likewise with chiptune poses a similar challenge: focusing on the process of composition, for example, cant hope to capture the diverse range of approaches that result in the chip sound, while basing a definition on the hardware and software platforms used to create the music can lead to some perverse exclusionsNintendos Game Boy, for example, has no dedicated sound chip yet played a pivotal role in the development of chip music.

Even trying to capture a comprehensive picture of the contemporary chiptune scene is not straightforward. Like any thriving community, it is multifaceted and comprises a number of tight-knit and sometimes exclusive cultures of practice, each with its own social values, hierarchies, and orthographies. Regardless of which corner of the

There is, however, one element that connects all of these strands together: the imaginative way musicians embrace the hardware, and use software both to capitalize on its affordances and to push transgressively beyond its constraints. As such, exploring the emergence and evolution of chip music depends as much on an understanding of the elegance and sophistication of low-level machine code and computer architectures as on the aesthetics and form of the works themselves.

But while technology plays an important part in the story of chip music, so too do the other areas of computer and electronic music that have influenced it and have in turn been shaped by it. Situating the chiptune phenomenon in its historical, cultural, and musical context, then, requires an interdisciplinary perspective, an approach that is quite common in the study of digital cultures.