Chiptune musings

Something happened today that has finally triggered me writing this phlog post,

which has been half-formed in my head for quite a while. As most of you

probably know, I have a weekly chiptune show on aNONradio, SDF's streaming radio

station with volunteer DJs. Not only do I have a show, somehow I actually have

listeners, too! One of them is recently-returned-to-gopher Kvothe, who last

month wrote[1]:

I didn't even really consider that there were different sub-genres of

chiptunes, but I really dig what solderpunk plays. IDK, a lot of the stuff I

find on Spotify chiptunes playlists is far too peppy for my tastes

I definitely think there are sub-genres of chiptune, and I have fairly distinct

tastes with regard to them. This post will be a rambling, over-thought dump of

thoughts on the matter which may, just possible, be of interest to fellow fans.

In a lot of ways, professing to "like chiptunes" does not make a lot of sense.

The only sensible definition of chiptune as a genre is something like "music

made with sound chips", where the context makes it implicit that "sound chips"

means something old or primitive sound chips; if you permitted modern DSP

chips with high bit depths and sampling rates to be included, the term would

become meaningless, because those chips can sound like anything at all. So,

this makes "chiptune" a genre defined entirely by instrument, and saying you

"like chiptunes" is frankly as weird as saying you "like guitar music" or

"like piano music". Those are versatile instruments which can play all kinds

of different music, which don't necesssarily sound much alike, and it would be

quite strange to enjoy them all. It makes a lot more sense to say that you

like Jazz piano or classical piano or whatever.

This raises the question of whether there is any stylistic content to the

concept of chiptunes, and there most definitely is and it ties in very closely

with the question of "authenticity", which is (or perhaps was) a major point

of debate for hardcore chiptune nerds.

Genuine vintage sound chips are increasingly rare, as are functioning hardware

platforms containing them and the skill set to compose music on them directly.

A lot of modern chiptune music is actually produced on typical desktop

computers using software synthesisers which try to emulate old soundchips,

either using high quality recordings of original hardware or just reproducing

the same synthesis technology of the original in software. This kind of music

is sometimes called "fakechip" by purists, but the extent to which it is

"fake" depends a lot on what imbues "real" chiptunes with their "real" status.

If chiptunes are defined entirely by the characteristic sonic texture of the

instruments, then it's hard to argue that software emulations somehow lose

this texture. Plenty of people will claim they can hear the difference

between the original and a software emulation, but in the vast majority of

cases they are kidding themselves. Afterall, we are very often talking about

• squarewaves* here. One squarewave of a given frequency sounds like any

other. And, yeah, the analogue output stage of the original output platform

might have some characteristic high or low frequency roll off, but that's not

hard to recreate in software either, at all.

Despite having this view, I do consider a lot of music as "fakebit" and I

confess I do kind of turn my nose up at it sometimes. It's not because the

sonic texture is noticably different, because it very often isn't it. It's

a style thing.

Early chiptunes (i.e. those made before "chiptunes" as a self-aware genre

label existed) have some characteristics which originated from the

constraints of both the sound chips themselves, and the computers driving

them, and the context that they were often a part of a game. If you are

genuinely interested in this, you owe it to yourself to check out Linus

Akesson's "Elements of chipmusic"[2], but I will try to give a brief sense

of it here. For example, "real music" tends to make extensive use of chords,

i.e. playing not individual notes, but groups of 3 or 4 notes with a specific

relation to one another simultaneously. Depending on how the notes are

related, the overall chord can take on an emotive quality that plain notes

by themselves lack. Possibly you are familiar with the basic examples of

major chords sounding "happy" and minor chords sounding "sad". Most of the

sound chips used in making chiptunes only have 3 or maybe 4 separate

oscillators on them, which makes chords problematic. If you play a

three-note chord, you have totally committed all of your musical resources.

You can't use chords in a melody played over a bassline with drums for

rhythm, you can only play the melody by itself. Chiptune artists over

come this by simulating chords with arepggios or "arps". Instead of playing

three notes simultaneously, you quickly and rapidly loop through playing

those three notes for a much shorter period of time than you would play

your chord. This imparts kind of the same effect. Major arps sound happy,

and minor arps sound sad, but they only occupy a single channel. This is

why so many chiptunes have that rapid, gargly sounding effect.

There is plenty of other stuff like this happening, and so technical

constraints, as well as the fact that "real" chiptunes were often the

soundtrack to a game (and hence had to sound exciting or adventurous or

scary), as well as the fact that they were composed in the 80s or 90s and

hence were influenced by the 80s or 90s "real music" the composers were

listening to, all combine to create a characteristic chiptune sound which

goes beyond just the timbre of the instruments.

Software synthesis on modern computers makes it possible to completely

disregard this characteristic style. You can have as many channels as you

like without running out of oscillators, the tracks can run for as long as

you like without running out of memory, you don't have to structure your

song so it loops nicely in a game, and instead of being inspired by the

electronic music of the 80s and early 90s, you can try to immitate modern

day stuff like dubstep. Emulation doesn't change the fundamental sound

(although many people combine authentic-sounding chiptune instruments with

very non-chiptuney "fat analogue bass" in the same piece), but it does

completely open up the compositional horizons and results in a much wider

range of music, which makes it perfectly reasonable to like some of it and

not like like other parts.

Personally, I tend to like "fakechip" stuff which I don't feel is too

much of a departure from the genre's origins, although there are

exceptions, I'm sure. Stuff which makes no attempt whatsoever to

connect itself to that heritage and is just making electronic music with

bleeps and bloops less often appeals to me, just like a lot of electronic

music made without bleeps and bloops doesn't appeal to me either.

Kvothe mentioned that a lot of chiptunes he has heard are too "preppy",

and I agree. I suspect, although I absolutely can't back this up with

anything resembling hard data, that a lot of this comes from younger

artists who did not really grow up with the computers, games and music,

but have gotten into chiptunes as part of the widespread interest in

retro/vintage just-about-anything, and who are trying too hard to infuse

their music with what they think of as an "old school video gamey" vibe,

which results in an exaggerated, cheesy, fast-and-cheerful sound that I

don't like. But take that with a pinch of salt, it could absolutely

just be me being a grumpy old gatekeeping bastard.

Something else vaguely related to the notion of authenticity in chiptunes

is the trend (which until recently I thought had subsided, to which I

will return) of small chiptune elements being used in mainstream pop

music. This usually just took the form of very brief, very obviously

video gamey samples, or brief little bits of melody, and was obviously

just cashing in on the retro/vintage craze, but it became surprisingly

common. I will admit I never really liked this, even before the incident

where Timbaland plagiarised a melody from a Finnish demoscene artist's

C64 song[3], which probably turned a lot of fans against the practice.

I fully admit that this is stupid and it wrong, but it felt like "theft"

of an important component of geek culture. I know that "cultural

appropriation" is "a thing" these days, but in general I am pretty deeply

sceptical of that idea, which seems to me almost like an explicitly

racist re-invention of the worst aspects of modern Western intellectual

property law. I don't believe that hardcore computer geeks who have

been listening to chiptunes for decades have an exclusive right to the

artform, and I believe it's silly of me to feel some kind of nerd rage

when popstars play "our" music. But I still have to admit, I felt it.

I was reminded of my thoughts on this matter last week when, while

listening to the radio, I heard a song which was alarmingly chiptuney

for mainstream intended-for-the-public radio of the kind you might play

in a cafe. Even at the height of the trend for pop artists to include

chiptune elements in their songs, it was only ever a nod in that

direction, with the overall song being 90:10 or 80:20 generic pop music

to chiptune. This song I heard the other day seemed pretty close to

50:50 to me, which is really surprising. I wish I knew what it was.

[1] gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/kvothe/phlog/2018/03/12-one-more-turn

[2] http://www.linusakesson.net/music/elements/index.php

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timbaland_plagiarism_controversy