What are chiptunes?

And you know what that means that Jeremiah was a bullfrog um, a good friend of mine. So we want to talk a little bit about music. We we actually did a podcast not re recorded it a while ago, but it hasn't published as the time of the recording of this about music in video games. But it turns out that the video games and music, it goes beyond just the stuff that you find in games. As it turns out, people have used the same sort of equipment that was originally intended to allow music to play in

video games to create new music. Yeah, it's it's funny because if you think about it, we as we were developing, we as in like people were developing video games, we

wanted musical inspiration. One of the things we talked about in that episode was musical environments, creating the right mood with music and sound effects to make the game more uh enriching, and it makes it more of a rewarding experience to play much more immersive that way, right, That's the word I was looking for, but I was trying

to cover. Thank you for saving me. Um. The thing is, though, and you wouldn't you wouldn't necessarily think about this, especially if you didn't grow up with with the older video game style that too bit, four bit, eight bit, a dollar. Um. You you might be as a haircut in there somewhere. It's funny because you might you might think, well, you know, that was so cruddy. I mean that the music wasn't

very high quality, and you know who cares. But as it turns out, people developed sort of an affection for that kind of a sound. Yeah, you can never disqualify nostalgia. The nostalgia factor conquers all. And then you have hackers. And we're not talking about the associated press definition of hackers, people who like to bust into computers to do damage. Um, we're talking about the classic sense of the word hacker, people who like to learn how things work and then

play with them. Yeah, take it apart, see what it does, put it back together in a different form, and see if you can break it and fix it again. Yeah, there's been some really cool hacks when that comes to this. So let's kind of boil down what we're focusing on today. Now, if we were just talking about music and the music you can create through video games, that would be in a north miss topic. And even even so we are. The topic we've chosen to focus on is still a

pretty big one, and it's called chip tunes. Yeah, this is this is the merger of hacking and the love for the eight bit sound. Right, So we're talking about the kinds of sounds you would get from classic video game systems and computer systems, things like the Atari, the original in nes, UH, the Commodore sixty four, and even some of the older like ib M s and things

of that nature. We're talking about systems that had a dedicated processor that was meant to generate sound, a dedicated chip and uh, the chip was able to create a certain range of frequencies and a certain range of tones, and that was it. It wasn't like a true synthesizer, right, It couldn't. It couldn't recreate the sound of, say, a violin. It could just create kind of a a weird sort of simulation of a violin that no person who had at least at least decent hearing would ever mistake for

a violin. But you could, you know, you could evoked the same sort of feeling, right right, Um, yeah, it's it's uh. I also wanted to clarify too, before we go too much for the one I said eight bit a minute ago that that seems to be uh the slang term now for old video game Uh. So, don't take that literally because some of the things we're gonna be talking about, our our even more rudimentary than eight

bit uh sounds. In our History of Video Game Music podcast, we talked about how on the earliest systems, the chip, a lot of the system sounds on games like the the early Palm consoles and the Atari, those were hardwired into that, so programmers had to take advantage of whatever

was available to them on that chip. They didn't have a lot of flexibility in that regard, and it wasn't until several years into the video game home video game craze that UH developers were able to create their own sounds and put it embedded in the software and the machine would play it back. That way, it would give them more ability in that regard. So a lot of people who make chip tunes are are taking apart consoles like UH Jonathan mentioned and the the game Boy too

because they're portable. Um And the first person I ever heard about I wrote a blog post about it a while ago, was a guy named pixel Hate. He's a probably or easily one of the most famous chip tune makers. UM. He actually I've actually seen him busting. There's a video of him on YouTube. His name's Matthew Applegate. He's lives in the United Kingdom and UH, I actually seen him with a modified UH game Boy out with a namp on the corner, and there's a video of him playing.

And it looks like he's standing there playing a video game, because that's he's essentially taking it apart and doing this, but he's ah, it looks like he's just standing there playing a video game, but he's actually playing music on the device. Now, the question is, how do you make that happen. Well. Part of the challenges that you actually have to create software that will allow you to sequence music, loop music to create those different uh frequencies that the

device is capable of. Now you gotta remember that you are you are confined to the the sounds of that chip is capable of creating, right, It's not like you can create any sound. Um. But there are quite a few of these programs specifically for the game Boy. Um let's see. I know that pixel Hate actually had come out with some of those himself and has since retracted them.

It does not offer them anymore. Um, there's one because he he said that he thinks it's um it wasn't right for him to do that anymore, so he's not making that available. But uh, yeah, he he was one of a number of people who. Um, it requires some some hardware modification because you have to you have to wire the buttons up to take advantage of the sound chip to some degree. And it depends, I think on

the console if if I've read correctly. Um, but yes, it does require some some software engineering as well in order to make it work. Yeah, there's uh there was one cartridge specifically for the game Boy that would let you do a lot of this, which you know, that was great because the cartridge did the work for you. Um and it was called Little Sound DJ or l S D j UH and again it had a sequencer built into it. It could produce the different four bit

sounds that the game Boy could create. UM and it had four channels for that, So you could create four channels of music with this thing. And you could actually create music live just like Chris was talking about. You could using using the control pad and the elect and start buttons and the A and B buttons, you could create loops and insert different sounds and actually sort of be a in this case, a four bit dj UM.

And that's pretty cool, that's uh, you know. And and that's actually taking direct advantage of the the chip in the game Boy. It's taking advantage of that chip's capabilities. As it turns out, not all chip tunes makers are using actual chips. But let's I want to talk about one other chip that was really important as far as

chip tunes are concerned. It was one of those that kind of inspired a lot of the early music makers in in computer music and uh, and that was the MS technology S I D Sound Interface device, which was for the Common or sixty four. And this was one of those devices that, like I said, was really instrumental. If you will, it's a little bit of a fun uh. And in launching this US craze about the eight bit music.

Another interesting thing just off off is kind of a tangent is that you know you mentioned that, uh is it pixel hates that? What you said? Yeah, pixel hate that. He was from the UK. I've noticed that a lot of the musicians who use the chip tunes method are from Europe, or if if you're from the UK and you don't like being lumped in with the Europeans from the UK or from Europe. Ah, it's interesting. It was just interesting to me because I also saw a guy

who had created a chip tunes synthesizer. He had converted an old oregan uh into a chip tunes player. He called it the chip a phone. What kind of organ was this? Um? It was this old like electronic organ, like not not like a bellows organ or anything like that, but yeah, it's like an electric organ. And he had converted it so that the various switches that would usually change the tone actually would do the different waves because

chip tunes could play sound waves in various formations. You have like triangle waves, saw tooth waves, pulse waves, and each of these waves have have sort of a distinctive sound to them, right, So you know, you think of the think of the different video games songs from the classic era, things like Legend of Zelda or Super Mario Brothers and the various bleeps, bloops and ants, and you know that those are all coming from the different shapes

of sound waves. And uh and actually the fellow who made the chip a phone uh lenis Akisson probably totally mispronounced his name. Um. He has a website where he talks about exactly what he did to create it, in including like the wiring that he did in order to make uh this this um this organ that would let him play chip tunes live. Because usually with chip tunes, what you're doing is you're either pro gramming something directly and so that it will play automatically on a chip.

So you know, you're not live, you're not performing it live. You you you actually program it, or you're doing a program with an emulator. And we'll talk about the emulators in a little bit, But that that Commodore sixty four chip, like I said, was a big um, a big inspiration for a lot of different musicians, not just musicians, but also engineers who are working on similar chips because the uh, the Commodore sixty four chip was the project started back

in one and can you guess where it premiered. It was let me let me put it to you this way, biggest consumer electronics conference in the world CS two c E S the Commodore sixty four Music Sound Interface Device chip premiered. The engineer who designed the chip was Robert Bob Yannis, and uh he actually later went on to be a founder of a synthesizer company, so that makes sense. But his original plan was actually much more grand than what came out, and part of the reason was just

that it was a time crunch. But the originally this chip was supposed to have thirty two independent voices, which is yeah, yeah, and you know, it just it was it was too ambitious a plan, and it turned out that that was just not gonna happen. He claims that about seventy of the things he had planned to incorporate in the chip made it into production, which I mean, when you think about how ambitious it was, I guess

that's not too bad, but uh, yeah it was. It was this this sort of interesting mix of noises and music that really got a lot of people interested. Um. And a lot of that stuff did carry over into the various chips that you found in other devices, not not all you know, the Commverse six before had that one. Uh. The other devices like the Atari had a chip that

they called Pokey. I remember Pokey. Yeah. Actually was going to mention that in the history podcast, and it looked like we were going to take a long time, so I just skipped over Pokey. Yeah. We we actually lived through most that history, which is why we were ready to talk about it at length. Uh. The Nintendo Entertainment Systems chip is the RICO to a O three, which

is you know, just rolls off the tongue. Uh. And then you had other chips made by Yamaha and other companies that um that were found in other devices like IBM s and the Sega Genesis things like that. So the the people who make chip tunes either have found ways to to create software to write music and then play them using these chips, or they found ways to emulate the sounds generated by these chips in software format and then they write the music for that. So, um,

you've probably heard us talk about emulators before. In case you haven't and you're not familiar with the term, an emulator is some sort of hardware or software that recreates or emulates the effects of another kind of software or hardware. You hear about it a lot with video games because the old arcade games all had dedicated chips that were specifically designed to allow those video games to play. So everything from the graphics to the sound, all of that

had dedicated hardware. So in order for you to play the arcade game on a computer, you have to create software that can sort of fool the the the program into thinking that your computer is that hardware. It has to recreate that. And that's why if you've ever played an emulated video game on a computer, sometimes depending on how good the emulator is or how appropriate it is for the RAM that you're playing, the RAM is essentially the game, the game may end up being very sluggish.

I remember I had a friend of mine who had emulator that played most games really well, but there were a couple of titles that if you were to try it, it felt like the game was running on a quarter speed, which made the game incredibly frustrating to play because you pressed jump and then you'd have to leave the room, get a sandwich, drink a drake, come back, and then you see that your guys finally off the ground. Um. So yeah, emulators come with their own set of problems.

Not you know, not all emulators are created equal, but that's your basic set of tools if you want to be a chip tunes musician. Right. Yeah, it's funny because I wanted to make the distinction earlier and then just completely forgot to get into it. Um. The difference in chip tunes is uh and and another technology. UM. Chip tunes is generally the programming side of it, when you're programming an old machine to make music, whereas circuit bending.

Have you hearn that term circuit bending is actually is actually creating short circuits in an electronic device in order to have it make music. Um. And there are believe it or not, festivals dedicated to both of these. So circuit bending would that be like the kind of stuff that people would do where they make hard drive spin at certain speeds in order to generate music. I I that's my understanding of postics. Um and and actually one of the projects. When I first found out about Matthew

Applegates work. UM, the very first thing that I saw called chip tunes wasn't actually by that by the definitions I just mentioned a chip tune. UM. His album Obsolete was a recording of devices. Is that. Uh. He had to work with the National muse Museum of Computing in the UK to get access to Do you remember this? This is this is new to me, okay. Uh. They gave him access to the machines at Bletchley Park. Yeah. Bletchley Park for those of you who are not familiar. UH,

is a computing center in the United Kingdom. It was instrumental in again no fun intended in um helping break the German code system that they were using in World War Two. Um. This goes back to h r UM podcast on Alan Touring. He's one of the people that worked at Bletchley Park. UM. And now it is the

side of the National Computing Museum. Uh. And they gave him access to some of the computing equipment that they had there, and of course he had to promise he wasn't going to break it, because creating chip tunes sometimes involves hacking to the point where stuff just doesn't work anymore. So he had to promise he was just going to

uh to record it. And what he recorded he was able to manipulate with uh you know, sound editing software and basically used the electric relays, not you know, the the uh little electric switches that they used for computing. And uh it's very staccato and percussive. But that's the

very first chip tune I ever heard. Really, I guess technically wasn't a chip tune, yes, but yeah, using the mechanical devices or you know, I guess you could call him electro mechanical because they are electronics, but they are also mechanical like a hard drive. UM, so yeah, you have you have the difference there. Um. But the festivals I was mentioning earlier, let's see, Uh there is um the Blip Festival, which is a chip tune festival, and uh there there is a series in New York called

Pulse Wave UM that is dedicated to this um. And the Bent Festival is for circuit benders um, people who use things like the speak and spell nice to create music. Well, and it just shows that that these little simple bleeps and bloops can really inspire people to do some pretty cool stuff. And I mean like, for example, uh, you know I talked about video games live the orchestra uh

presentation of video game music. What's funny to me is that now you've come to the point where you have full orchestras, yes, playing and in some cases emulating in the sense that they're trying to get these very sophisticated instruments to sound like the bleeps and bloops that came from the old video games. You've gone full circle because the video game bleeps and bloops were meant to kind of get us close to what we consider your classic music.

You want them to sound like violins and and and trumpets, and now they're using trumpets to sound like leaps and bloops. It's a madness. Well, um, if you want to join in, there is a chip Tune Marching band. And if you go to the chip Tune Marching Band website um, which I thoughtfully didn't include the address to in my notes. Um, I can look it up in a second, or you

can if you want to. They will give you instructions their instructions online and what you need to to create your own chip tune instruments so that you can participate. That website is chip Tune Marching Band dot com. I didn't know if it was something more difficult than that I could know, but that that there you what is up with me and my notes that I wasn't very good today? I don't know. I'm I'm guessing it's because you're using an um a tablet computer, which you know,

I'm using a computer computer. And okay, enough of my anti tablet bias. That's okay, the keyboard on your computer computer doesn't work, This is true. But yes, the the chip tune Marching Man, and I've also seen I've also seen on YouTube. If you go to YouTube, there are of course dozens and dozens of chip tunes videos, and some of the videos like they include the videos of the guy with the chip a phone where you can

watch him play on this this Oregon. You can watch him play live all the tunes that came from old video games, and he can get really close to the sound of those tunes, like to the point where, uh, you know, if you close your eyes you can almost imagine that this is the video game. Um, it's not quite the same, because, of course, when you program a song for a computer, it's always gonna play it at that speed, you know, the tempo and everything. None of

that's gonna change there. It's never gonna make a mistake, right Whereas we're humans and we occasionally do like you hit a wrong note or you lose the tempo a little bit, specially if you're a drummer, and uh say, I almost never hit a wrong note, right, you just hit the wrong beat. But yeah, the the you can watch that. And there's also I saw a guy who had what he called the chip tunes. He called it a chip tune guitar or an eight big guitar, and maybe he called an eight big guitar. Yeah. It was

actually a really cool project. He had designed it for a college project or high school project. I think it

was college, but it was. It looked like a guitar body, but instead of strings, it had six arcade buttons on it, and then the fret had actually strips of of of capacit type material so that it could detect when he was touching it, and by pressing a button he would generate a certain tone, and then by moving his hand up and down the fret, it would actually change the pitch and he could play it like a guitar, and

he could create loops. He would play a certain series of notes that would become a loop, and then he could switch to a different button and play other notes and mix a song live using this guitar like device that used of the chip tunes mentality, it seems to me that it would be pretty easy to uh. And I'm sure someone has done it. I just hadn't thought of thought to look it up before you just said that. Um,

you know, to use the guitar hero style controllers. You know, with some of those the buttons already wired up, you probably wouldn't require a whole lot of modification to make an instrument like that. And I you know, we could look it up now, but it's kind of late. But yeah, you know, it's already wired to some degree and has the switches in place so that it wouldn't require too

much change. And you can think of chip tunes also being sort of the predecessor for um, for true synthesizers, you know, uh synthesizers and are a little more sophisticated than the old chip tunes chips. But uh, and of course there were synthesizers that came out before the chips meant for the computers, but you know, they didn't really get sophisticated until you got to the point where you could hit the boss of Nova button and get that. I had a Cassio keyboard, you better believe it. Yeah.

And and despite the fact that I don't ever remember hearing the song before I got the Cassio keyboard, I did learn how to play hert and soul. Yes, it does appear that just in a quick search on Google, I'm finding that they are all sorts of chip tunes and guitar hero controller links. So I I certainly was the third person to think of that today. Yeah. Um, so it's it's already been done, so I should. I think everyone should probably check that out and see what

people are doing with it. So people are using these these devices and these these programs to create new music, um, but they're also using them to to uh cover songs or to convert songs into eight bit format. We actually

listened to a couple of funny uh examples this this morning. Uh. If you went to see the film Scott Pilgrim Versus the World, and you were there at the very beginning of the movie, it opens with an eight bit graphic version of the Universal Pictures logo, and it also has a Chip Tunes version of their their theme, which is very clever. And it got a big laugh when I saw it because I saw it in a pre screening and we were it was so it's a theater packed

with nerds, right, you know, myself included. So here we are a bunch of nerds watching this, and as soon as the Universal logo popped up in that that format, we all started laughing. And then when the music played, it was that game over. Really, I mean, Edgar right had us in the palm of his hand. But I also found, Uh, if you aren't familiar with the wonderful meme of Trolo lol, which at this time has died down right, we've gotten into the point where the peak

of that popularity is way past us now. It's not one of those memes that's really stuck around, but trolla lull being the Uh is he Russian? Yes? And I know that from he was from the Soviet era, That's what the clips from. Yeah, I do, I do believe he is. He is actually Russian. And the recording, however, was from a I believe Swedish TV show, and it's

a fellow singing. Of course, he's not singing any words because the words were considered to be a little too uh inflammatory by the Soviets at the time, so he replaced it all with just vocalizations yeah, they call it vocalize yeah, and the or the style. Apparently it inspired the whole There was a whole movement back then around that we kind of like this, not terribly different from

movements like uh like scat singing. So but anyway, the trolla Lull tune got a lot of play on YouTube, and then I found a chip tune version of trolla Lull, which amused us greatly. But but what's also cool is that people have used this kind of music to to create other forms of art that are to me really creative and entertaining. Like we talked about in our web success stories, we talked about Dr Horrible and Dr Horrible

sing Along Blog. Well, there was a guy who created a Doctor Horrible sing Along blog eight bit video game video. He did the the whole story, which is done in three parts, and he also did his version in three parts as a video game. But that dated back to the Ninteno Entertainment system era, so it's all done in that style. The graphics were in that style, and the

music was in that style. He took the music from the web series and converted it into chip Tunes versions of those songs, so if you knew the show, if you knew the web series, you could actually you know, humm along, you're you're singing my freezerrae will stop the world, and you're just you know, here in the chip tunes

version of it. I was very clever, and I've seen other versions of that as well, where you know, people have to again popular movies or television shows or musicals even and converted it into an eight bit version using chip tunes to create the music, and it does give it that weird retro uh feel to it. That's it's kind of geeky but kind of cool at the same time. So that's really interesting. Wow, you're ready to wrap up

and I don't have anything else. It's it's funny though I know I've said that a lot, but it's kind of interesting that so much has been done with this. Yeah, it's the kind of thing that maybe you know somebody who does it and you think, well, you know, it's just my my friend who's really into uh RD we know, boards and taking things apart. But there's it's a whole movement and it's been around for a long long time now,

you know, thirty years. Yeah, and you see you see some I mean, we've seen a lot of people create weird ways to create you know, music, live music and uh and chip tunes. That's just one version. I mean, we could talk about, like architect whether you use tesla coils to create music, uh, same sort of thing, and the idea that you know, you're taking something that's very technical and geeky and then you're adding the creative side

to it, the artistic creative side. And a lot of people think that those two worlds kind of exist apart from each other, and the truth is that they overlap a lot. You know, a lot of the a lot of the engineers who created the video games, especially the early ones, were also the ones who created all the music, right, they weren't. It wasn't like, you know, you had you had the guys in the white lab coats in one part of the building and all the musicians and the

messy part of the building. That's just not how it worked. They were all in the messy part of the building anyway. So that's kind of our discussion on ship tunes. When I upload. When I went I write the blog post for this podcast, I will include some videos of chip tunes from YouTube because I think it's important, including I think the troll a Lil One, because I don't think

I can get away from that. So as long as I can find the troll a Lil One on YouTube, then I will include that, because the side I found it on was not YouTube. Um and then I think it's there. Yeah, I think it is. Actually, I see, I see it now, so I will include that as well. The eight bit inspired chip tune cover of the famous meme Mr trolla Lull, So I will include that because

it's priceless. So if you guys want to actually hear some of the stuff, go to YouTube check it out, go to the blogs once I get the blog post up, once this podcast goes live, and check it out. And uh and and if you're interested in really do some research, you might be able to find either an emulator or maybe even an old chip set up where you can actually program stuff directly so that it plays on the hardware.

There are setups like that I've seen a few kind of hack together things that are really really cool and uh, and really you're just limited by your own creativity. Yeah, and definitely if this is something that you've already been doing, we'd love to hear what you've what you've got, so certainly share that with us. Yeah, because I mean, I like to rock out at work. He does. It's true, it's a little disturbing to the rest of it. Yeah, if you've done any chip Tunes versions of the Ramons,

totally send them to me. All Right, we're gonna wrap this up. If you guys would like to interact with us, you can do that on Twitter and Facebook are handled. There is text stuff h s W or you can shoot us an email. That email addresses tech stuff at how stuff works dot com. Chris and I will talk to you again really soon. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com. So learn more about the podcast, click on the podcast

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