Sound Journal Research Final Project

The final project has been a challenging artwork and before reaching the final outcome of the project i have explored many ideas and forms. Initially I began looking at surround sound installations. Firstly I played with the ideas of conscious and unconscious thoughts of the human mind.

I began looking at artists such as the flamming lips who released a four disc album where each album had to be synced using separate media devices to be played.

http://www.flaminglips.com/

My next concept involved the idea of a darkened space and having a surround sound installation. The installation idea was to make a series of voice recordings and these would surround the viewer and inclose in on them in the space. The idea behind this concept was to create an anxiety and make the viewer feel trapped and inclosed within the space. The installation would use motion detection to detect the viewer within the space to activate the artwork using computer software such as quartz composer.

This idea then lead the project into another area by trying to create anticipation using sound and imagery. I wanted to create the feeling of anticipation using the sounds of everyday objects. The objects most engaging and interesting was the time waiting for a kettle to boil, waiting for toast to pop and how long an egg in the microwave will cook before it explodes. The idea was to create three video screens and loop these images and have each of the actions happen one at a time. I tested these sounds however i still thought that this project was not to engaging for the viewer. I questioned myself wondering if it was only me that found these objects created anticipation.

I remembered back to the artists presentations in class and one of the presentations that i found really interesting was about the artist Tristan Perich. Perich created the work 1-bit music in 2004-2005 the device was an electronic circuit assembled inside a CD case with a headphone jack on the side. The device plays back 40 minutes of low-fi 1-bit electronic music—the lowest possible digital representation of audio.

Video can be found here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rl_ovH9ypkM&feature=related

Looking into 1 bit music made me think of the old nintendo gameboy games and the music the 8bit music that was created for them.

Through research into gameboy songs I found that people have been using gameboy consoles to generate music for DJ sets or using the consoles to create entire music tracks for video games for a while.

ARTISTS THAT ARE CREATING 8-BIT MUSIC

Henry Homesweet - Lo-Bit Bassment #8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCgI0f7YdsQ

Henry Homesweet - Lo-Bit Bassment #1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBkeTMHVVxM&feature=related

gameboy dj

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXmPd7miPUI

‪Milz - Happy hardcore game boy mix

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGF4BO08Sk4

8bit song

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBVoONryE3s

Whilst looking at some of the gameboy music i found a few a 8bit song that was very impressive

Mario meets Queen

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXmNjB4-JdE

this song was also interesting as it involves four people playing the game mario to recreate the song queen

HOW TO CREATE BIT MUSIC

I discovered that there were several ways to create 8 bit music through programs that were available on both mac and pc. However i was more interesting in creating the music directly from the game boy console itself. I attached my gameboy into the audio input of my computer and tested a few recordings through soundtrack pro. Using the sound recordings of the game boy levels I had played I tested a few remixing tracks to isolate certain parts of the recording. On playback of what I had created I was not convinced that the simple remix of the songs was not working as well as i expected. Through further research I found that using a emulator of a gameboy console on the computer that a series of programs had been created to make 8bit music. I found the program nano loop was the best one available at the moment.

http://www.nanoloop.de/advance/index.html

Another example is by little sound DJ

http://www.littlesounddj.com/lsd/

Nanoloop is a Stepsequencer which means that a pattern of 16 1/16 notes is played repeatedly while these notes can be edited in various respects like volume, pitch etc. There are four channels, playing simultaneously. Each channel's patterns can be saved to file slots in flash memory and are then available for new combinations. Finally, saved patterns can be arranged in a song structure.

Above: the interface of nano loop

The instructions and information about Nano Loop can be found here

http://www.nanoloop.de/advance/nanoloop25.pdf

With the ability to save states in nano loop this gave me the idea to be able to perform a performance piece for the project along with the sounds of a gameboy being played at the same time.

This process is called chip tune, all known as chip music. Chip music is synthesised electronic music that is produced with sound chips vintage computers and video game consoles. Since computers and consoles change rapidly these low end consoles are in low demand they are not expensive and easy to find which make them a highly-accessible and affordable method of creating sound or art. Below: An example of someone creating sound art with chip tunes.

Mobb Beep is a Copenhagen-based act, which nowadays consists of only one person. The set felt quite improvised, with what seemed to be a lot of tweeking with the Gameboys and the effects. He also works with custom samples, which immediately separates it from a lot of Gameboy music.

Mobb Beep

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=QGBtoit_nTQ#!

Lo-Bit Basement are a Stockholm-based duo who improvise audiovisually with various 8-bit tools and electronics. Apart from some Nintendo handhelds, they use an electronic wind instrument which gives the music a lot of life, compared to many other low-bit improvisations.

Lo-Bit Basement

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=myG0zML8Xtg

A series of other game boy artists can be found here at:

http://chipflip.wordpress.com/category/gameboy/

CHIPMUSIC

Below is an explanation of chip music source: http://chipflip.wordpress.com/chipmusic/

Traditionally, chipmusic has been defined by what gadgets were used to make the music. As the sounds of 8-bit machines has influenced and been influenced by pop culture at large, the technological definition proved to be problematic for general use. A musical genre definition developed during the 21st century. For some this lead to a loss of authenticity, while others welcomed it as a loss of elitist techno-fundamentalism. I distinguish between chipmusic as medium and chipmusic as form. Chipmusic as medium is any music made with a specific medium (typically a range of soundchips from the 1980s) and chipmusic as form is a music genre made with any kind of technology. Chipmusic can also be analyzed as a subculture with its own communication media, norms, status makers, artifacts, and software. I first presented this in the text “Chip Music: Low Tech Data Music Sharing“.

Chipmusic as Medium

Chipmusic can sound both like classical music and noise. It can be stiff as a robot, or dynamic as the wind. A sound chip is an instrument that can be used for many purposes (see genres). The soundchip is an artistic material, and the surrounding hard- and software forms an instrument that will always make chip music. This type of chip music can be quite political in how it appropriates hard and software in media-specific ways that cannot be simulated or mimicked. Thus, this media materialistic perspective is useful for discussing hardware politics, low-level cybernetics, open source music formats, and unorthodox coding, for example. The problem is that even if it is a material definition, it is quite difficult to decide what hardware to include or exclude. Some popular chip music machines do not have a specific sound chip (Gameboy), some chips use sampled waveforms or FM-synthesis (Paula, YM2413, etc), and with the development of microcontrollers software becomes hardware. Door bells, keyboards, toys, emulators?

Chipmusic as Form

Leaving methodology behind, this perspective focuses on the musical results. Disregarding from technology, as most people probably do when discussing music, chip music is instead regarded as a genre where some timbres, rhythms, and harmonies are more common than others. You can use old technology to make music that doesn’t have the form of chipmusic, ie Neophyte’s gabber music and Patric Catani’s hardcore music. But perhaps more relevant is that not all chip music is made using old computers and consoles, or even emulations or samples of them. For example, analogue synthesizers can basically make the same waveforms as chip music technology does. Of course, typical characteristics in the soft- and hardware of chipmusic media are very hard to reproduce this way, but the point is that technology can be irrelevant.

Chipmusic as Culture

Chip music culture lives on the internet. From micromusic.net in 1999 and8bitcollective today, chip music has typically been surrounded by an atmosphere of sharing music and ideas, and a “global” organization. There are many archives of MP3s, non-recorded music (“open source”), and software easily accessible.

Ever since the term chip music was first used around 1990, it has been surrounded by free software (as in free beer) developed within a community of hobbyists who shared music for free. Commercial chip music was getting less commercially viable, so it was in the so called demoscene where chip music made most progress during the 90s. The demoscene was, and still is, a modem-networked community focused around the production and dissemination of audiovisual artefacts generated in real-time. It was here that the tracker-standard was developed, still dominating chip composing (LSDJ, Renoise, Maxymizer, etc). There was a focus on craftmanship and competitiveness rather than art and concepts (which changed over the years). The demoscene was a precursor to netlabels, digital communities, and real-time “music videos” maximising technology, and it is relevant to consider when talking about chip music culture.

Game Boy Genius

This series of videos is from gameboy genius who directly changes the chipsets within gameboys to manipulate the hardware and change there use. he has made a game boy in a fm radio.

LittleFM? from Gameboy Genius on Vimeo.

Steam Punk Game Boys

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMVHrwJbihY&feature=player_embedded#!

Artist Turns a Game Boy into Victorian Treasure

Of all the Steampunk gadgets and gizmos that are hitting the mainstream these days, the Steampunk Game Boy has got to be one of the coolest. The artist has done a simply fantastic job at recreating the Game Boy as a Victorian treasure.

The artist loaded the Steampunk Game Boy with a Pro Sound Mod so it plays original retro gaming sounds from the early 1990’s. As case mods go, the Steampunk Gameboy mod has got to be one of the best looking Victorian mods ever.

Laser Game Boys

Source: http://entter.com/dot-ay.com/?project=laser-gameboys-2-0

Video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=NT5us1XKnNk

Artists statement

The idea for this project is to be a sort of door chime for the digital arts centre in Brisbane. As people walk in a laser tripwire triggers a Gameboy to play back audio the audio from the Gameboy then triggers movement on an old CRT monitor there are two of these tripwire / gameboy / screen combos. The Gameboy laser trigger part of the project was fully documentedhere. I’m going to hand draw some schematics this week and finally get them up as well.

The second part of the project was the CRT monitors and VGA hack the entire concept comes from good friend little-scale (here) and he helped me through out the project troubleshooting ideas and the like. My one change of little-scales set up is to make the Hack standalone running without the need of a laptop or other VGA source. I used a code by dwan that generates the Horizontal and Vertical Sync for VGA (here). My final script for the standalone monitors is here.

Another thing I had to change was to get a more efficient power source for the lasers as well as a way for mounting them and the lasers. I ended up getting some AA battery packs with switches, attaching alligator clips to the spring and the ground and attaching that to the + and – battery terminals. For housing I used small lego cubes I had from another project.

8 Bit Peoples

http://www.8bitpeoples.com/artist/bit_shifter

An electronic musician based in New York City, Bit Shifter explores high-impact, low-res music produced using primitive gear and synthesis as a deliberate aesthetic choice. In a bracing distillation of the less-is-more philosophy, Bit Shifter operates with a standard Nintendo Game Boy as a means of exploring the aesthetics of economy, pushing minimal hardware to its maximum.