What Is Chiptune, Anyway?
Chiptune—also called chip music or 8-bit—is one of the liveliest, most progressive, diversified, and wildly convoluted musical genres that you’ve probably never heard of.
Now let’s shuffle through lost Game Boy cartridges, huff and puff into our original Nintendo Entertainment System, and dust off the old Commodore 64 in an attempt to dig up the genre’s origins, and iron out the creases of this fairly original, oddly nostalgic, and awesomely low-tech brand of music.
Born in the ‘80s, chiptune really grew from the advent of home computer systems and entertainment consoles like the Atari, the Commodore 64, and the NES, as well as their newly programmable audio hardware.
Simply put, chiptune is the sounds or music made from programming microchip-based hardware. Eventually chiptune became its own genre, which encompasses a multitude of sub-genres and sonic mutations using those original, elemental sounds.
In its early stages, most people who gave a damn about it were programmers making music for video games. But as the technology became outdated, and the systems more advanced, chiptunes, and sampling these chips into electronic music, became cheap and easily accessible—and super-cool.
Thanks to the ease of using such hardware, people were able to create and emulate sounds found in heavy metal, rock ‘n’ roll, techno and jazz—among others.
Despite its beginnings as a genre born out of necessity, today chiptune is a retrospective look—a process of unearthing childhood consoles, and memories, striving for that authentic sound.
