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