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

Performances Night / Festival multimedia GAMERZ 04: Confipop - 4 bits Gameboy Live :: February 6, 2009; 9:00 pm to midnight :: Aix-en-Provence, France.

Confipop - 4 bits Gameboy live: Confipop is a chipmusic Marseille based artist who makes music with a Gameboy and some modified sound toys. Native from the techno free party, he has been making music under different pseudonyme since 1996. As the best dancefloor’s friend, Confipop makes a happy and groovy dancing music, which goes from reggaeblip to technoblop, with the specific 4 bits sound of the gameboy: a modern music with old forgotten gamesound, very appropriated to have fun. Building his own toys/instruments, Confipop is an adept and a teacher of “circuitbending”, which consists in modifying toys in order to make music rather than buying expensive instruments. Continue reading

From Peter Kirn at createdigitalmusic.com: “8-bit and robots and odd Max and Reaktor patches and custom visual software and visualizations of data packets and sound made from plants and mutant trumpets and gloves for DJing and laptop music – we’ve got quite a lineup here in New York this week.

Friday night, a live audiovisual lineup from the worlds of createdigitalmusic.com / createdigitalmotion.com invades the HOPE conference, aka Hackers on Planet Earth, the three day-long convergence of tech hacking. $10, open to all, 11-2a Friday July 18 at the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York. It’s a live digital, technological variety show in a doomed NYC landmark hotel with an audience of famous and infamous hackers. (Think Kevin Mitnick and MythBusters’ Adam Savage and Steven Levy, all in one place.)

Facebook event page; also on Going.com”

More media and preview videos can be seen at Create Digital Music. 

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From: Associated Press via Technology Review, December 6, 2007: ‘Chiptune’ artists use vintage computers and video games to craft a new musical genre - NEW YORK (AP) - Haeyoung Kim, a classical pianist, took the stage at a hip Manhattan art space before a crowd of twenty- and thirty-somethings, many shaggy-haired and wearing T-shirts and glasses.

As her performance began, the room filled with electronic beeps and buzzes of a 1980’s video game pulsing to a danceable beat, as if Mario were hosting a rave. As heads bopped in the audience, Kim proudly held up her instrument: a Nintendo Game Boy. Continue reading

“Listening Post: You have a classical background; what drew you to creating 8-bit music? What do you find alluring about the chiptune aesthetic?

Haeyoung Kim, BubblyFish: I started with classical music first, and moved on to electronic music. I have in electronic music and computer music, so experimental music. Classical is more my background. So I picked up a GameBoy, I guess 4 or 5 years ago already, and when I started using it, I just loved the sound of it, and part of the big deal is that there’s a huge limitation that does not require much music production at all. Since there’s such a limitation, I think I can push myself to be more creative, and think differently from the way that I usually create music, with more available tools…” From Interview: Chiptune Artist Haeyoung Kim, BubblyFish by Eliot Van Buskirk, Wired. Also see Interview with Paul Slocum, Tree Wave.