The strictest definition of chiptune is music that is composed for and produced on the dedicated sound chips of computer and video game hardware primarily produced in the 20th century, usually composed on homebrew software that runs natively on retro hardware. A more expansive definition would also include music produced on modern hardware using contemporary digital audio workshop tools that simply sounds like it was produced on retro game audio hardware. While the chiptune community was at one point split between purist “realbit” produced on dedicated hardware and “fakebit” produced digitally on contemporary hardware, the community has widely adopted an expansive definition that includes both.
Who is chiptune?
Chiptune producers come from all walks of life, all around the world. Between the global availability of retro game audio devices, the proliferation of emulator software, and the development of homebrewed software for interfacing with these old sound chips means that anyone can make chiptune music! While most people think of “video game music” or electronic dance music when they think of chiptune, it is less a genre than it is a process for music-making. There are producers making EDM, metal, game soundtracks, progressive rock, and even sea shanties! While anyone can make chiptune music, the community of fans and musicians alike trends queer and transgender due to its welcoming nature and niche status among music producers.
The History of Chiptune
Roots in the Demoscene
The ethos of the chiptune community has its roots in early home computer culture. Computer enthusiasts in the 1980s helped transform the personal computer from primarily business-oriented devices into devices for making art. The rise of software piracy eventually manifested in file-sharing parties (called demoparties), with groups of hackers competing to be the first to crack the newest software. Using the precious few kilobytes of leftover storage space on a floppy disk, hacking groups would produce impressively complex audio/visual compositions called demos to show off their prowess and flex on rival groups. These demos soon became the main event at these gatherings, with programmers pushing the computational and graphical limits of these computers to the absolute extreme. This ethos of pushing computer hardware to the absolute limit carries over into the chiptune community.
Hackers, Crackers, & Homebrewed Trackers
While computer platforms like the Commodore 64 and Amiga allowed programmers to make incredible music-making programs, it took longer for the homebrew community to develop music-making tools for the game consoles of the 1980s. The earliest music composition programs on early PCs featured pre-made virtual instruments and used staff notation composition interfaces, but many users found the user experience frustrating and the lack of direct control over the sound chip limiting. To work around this, a style of digital audio workshop called a tracker was developed that allowed for more fine-grain control over the sound chip that enabled programmers to control sounds with more precision.
Handheld Harmonies
The influence of tracker programs as a computationally efficient and familiar interface extended into the fledgling chiptune scene in the 1990s. With the advent of programmable cartridges for the Game Boy in the early 1990s, the first widely used native music-making program developed for a home video game console was Nanoloop (first commercially released in Germany in 1999), a 16-step sequencer designed for live composition. In 2000, the first tracker program for a game console, Little Sound DJ for the Game Boy, was released and subsequently became one of the most widely-used DAWs for making chiptune music, due to its continuous development over the last 25 years and the widespread availability of the Nintendo Game Boy hardware.
From Forums to Festivals
The first places where chiptune musicians started gathering was on web forums attached to netlabels such as micromusic.net and later 8bitpeoples & Jaharti, where users would post questions about composition tips/tricks, tutorials, troubleshooting, etc. (Driscoll). The mid-2000s saw the rise of video game conventions that hosted chiptune and 8-bit cover bands, such as Blipfest (2006). These conventions and music festivals acted as a point of convergence for the otherwise online and geographically-scattered chiptune community to come together. Notable large-scale chiptune gatherings include:
Magfest
Blipfest
SquareSound
Chipwrecked
8Static
Boston
Bitdown
Doing More with Less
Most methods of creating chiptune music impose a great number of compositional restraints that limit the variety and concurrent sounds possible. While at first, this might seem frustrating, but for many, this is actually the appeal of creating this way. Traditional music might ask a composer to fill in an infinite space with substance, whereas chiptune tasks them with writing in such a way that breaks through a very finite space. While sometimes, these methods become common practice, new sounds and compositional techniques are being innovated on these platforms to this day. This spirit of boundary-pushing and exploration is one of the things that keeps chiptune flourishing. Chiptune is, for many producers, the art of doing more with less.
The Queer Phenomenology of Chiptune
The chiptune community is a notably queer group: sexual and gender minorities are overrepresented relative to the general population in its fans and producers alike (a Venn diagram with significant overlap). While little scholarly research exists that might explain why, our interviews with trans chiptune musicians revealed some potential explanations. One possible cause is that because of the niche nature of this form of music-making, chiptune communities may be particularly tolerant of difference because maintaining a welcoming community is important to sustaining online and AFK groups. Another possible explanation may be a trend toward tolerance stemming from a geek-oriented positionality: chiptuners may feel judged or misunderstood because of their niche interests and feel more at ease in a community that understands the negative impact of social ostracization. The prevalence of transgender musicians may be explained, in part, by the parallels between chiptune and transness on a conceptual level: both are transformative acts of taking hardware meant for one purpose and hacking it to serve a desire for radical self-expression.
