Apple II Concert :: June 25, 2011; 6:00 pm: Meeting of the Apple II owners/musicians; 8:00 pm: Concert :: Machine Project, 1200-D North Alvarado Street, Los Angeles, CA :: We are currently seeking Apple II owners to contribute to making this happen! Please contact machine [at] machineproject.com if you would like to participate!

The old Apple II, first introduced in 1977, was a revolutionary computer in many ways. Sound capabilities were not one of them. The Apple II’s sound system, unlike contemporaries such as the Atari 800 or Commodore 64, did not use a discreet sound chip, but rather a simple timer circuit that could be coaxed into creating square-wave tones. Most chiptune musicians tend to use sound-chip based systems, but there is a certain charm to square-wave tones. Some may define this charm as “annoyance.” Continue reading

Playlist, playing Games, Music, Art :: June 4 – August 21, 2010 :: Opening: June 3; 6:00 – 11:00 pm :: iMAL Center for Digital Cultures and Technology, Koolmijnenkaai 30 Quai des Charbonnages, 1080 Brussels.

iMAL, Center for Digital Cultures and Technologies is proud to announce Playlist. Playing Games, Music, Art, an exhibition focused on the artistic reinvention of obsolete digital media. Produced and hosted by LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial (Gijón, Asturias) in the frame of the Mediateca Expandida, Playlist now moves to Brussels enriched with twelve new participants and a broader range of artworks. Continue reading

Make a noisy chip toy! :: December 16, 2009; 4:00 – 9:00 p.m. :: 9-15 Wyckoff Ave., Queens, NY (Directions).

Want to make your own chip toy? For $15 in parts, you can. We’re going to open up Babycastles at 4p for an open lab with the Loud Objects kits. Make it if you can, and bring soldering iron(s). (We’ll keep soldering kits right on to close at 9p!) We’ll also have other custom creators; got some project you want to bring, or just want to fiddle with your Game Boy? Bring it on!

Party with Indie Gamers and DIY Chip Musicians, 6:00 – 9:00 p.m., Free! The party starts at 6:00 p.m., with independent games to play in the arcade and their creators, geeky greet + meet, noisy things to hear, stuff to see. All artists and art lovers welcome. Ends at 9:00 p.m. so those in Blip Fest can get back to Manhattan.

Chip Tune Marching Band — workshop + performance :: Space, 129-131 Mare St., Hackney, London, E8 :: October 24, 2009; 3:00 – 7:00 p.m. :: To book your place, go here.

Chiptune Marching Band from jamie allen on Vimeo.

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Chiptune Marching Band — DIY soundmaking with Kazuhiro Jo, Jamie Allen from the Culture Lab at Newcastle University :: August 8, 2009; 12:00 – 3:30 pm :: NK, ElsenStr. 52 2HH 2Etage 12059, Berlin, Germany :: Register by email: eNKa_NK [at] gmx.de :: Places are limited to 15.

Chiptune Marching Band from jamie allen on Vimeo.

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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