CHIPTUNE REMAINS A DISTINCTIVE PART OF MODERN MUSIC, BOTH IN THE GAMING COMMUNITY THAT POPULARISED IT AND IN WIDER CULTURE. WE SPEAK TO MODERN COMPOSERS TO FIND OUT HOW THEY CREATE CHIPTUNE AND HOW THE MEDIUM IS EVOLVING

WORDS BY NIALL O’DONOGHUE

There’s something wonderfully transportive about chiptune. No matter the context, hearing a few bars of a square wave melody instantly brings you to a better time and place, evoking images of countless hours spent in front of classic consoles. Think of the Super Mario Bros theme; with just a few repeating melody lines and minimalistic percussion, Koji Kondo created something truly timeless. “I wanted to create something that had never been heard before, where you’d think, ‘This isn’t like game music at all, isn’t it?,’” Kondo said about his soundtrack in a 2007 Wired interview. “It had to fit the game the best, enhance the gameplay and make it more enjoyable. Not just sit there and be something that plays while you play the game.”

However, its history can be traced back decades earlier. Broadly defined as making music using sounds generated by retro computer sound chips, composer and enterprise fellow at The University Of Melbourne Kenneth B McAlpine traces chiptune’s origins back to the Fifties, when researchers used computers like the TX-0 and PDP-1 to make music.

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“The music of the PDP-1 was raspy and coarse, but it was a new and compelling voice,” Kenneth writes in his book Bits And Pieces: A History Of Chiptunes. “Although it would be a few more years before this voice echoed in the virtual space of videogames, it hinted at how those games might sound.”

In the intervening decades, chiptune has endured as a cultural force. Kenneth credits sequencers like Little Sound DJ (LSDJ) and Nanoloop with helping to bring about a modern wave of chiptune musicians in the Nineties, alongside the incorporation of virtualised recording studio hardware into desktop sequencers. “Chipmusic was reborn with a new, harder sound, less influenced by videogaming than by other contemporary musical sounds: dubstep, house, glitch and reggae,” Kenneth says.