Historical Overview

    Musical/Cultural Analysis

    Historical Overview

    Musical/Cultural Analysis

 

Validity and Accessibility

Chiptunes and Circuit Bending have been explained as being subcultures and genres that were created from certain technologies, but are they valid artistic pursuits and do they provide an accessible alternative to other electronic art music? Firstly I will discuss Chiptunes in relation to the results of my methodology and various literatures. Followed by the same discussion on Circuit Bending.

    From my ‘participant observation’ within the Chip scene a few things revealed themselves as to why it is or perhaps is not a valid artistic form. Firstly composing music from limited resources is extremely challenging and most Chip composers quote this as their reason for making the music (Cool Hunting, ep.1, 2006). Belinke’s (1999) paper describes the creative and inventive nature of using a video game sound chip, and a very common point to arise is that being creative using limited resources only expands the creativity. Some observations I made were the elitist nature of the Chip scene, this is one of the areas in which there is great debate (VORC, n.d), and often some great songs are disregarded because of thoughts of unauthenticity. For the art form to expand and improve, this elitist behaviour will have to be forgotten. The only other element of negativity is its inability to be disconnected from video game semiotics and many believe because of this it will remain nothing more than a novelty (Flat Four Radio, ep.4, 2004). As Montgomery Knott says “Its fun and its interesting, but how its applied, it needs to go somewhere else” (Cool Hunting, ep.5, 2006). This seems to be a general view, but if it is looked at from the point of view as an art form in which musicians challenge themselves it has to be seen as a valid musical style.

    The accessibility of Chiptunes can be assessed from a variety of factors. First of all the level of melodic content immediately interests many listeners more than most art music. The Gameboy has opened up the accessibility as Mike Rosenthal, the artistic director of electronic art music venue ‘The Tank’ said; “something that is so appealing about the Gameboy, is people get it. They see it they love it, it reminds them of their youth, their childhood…some of the biggest nights at ‘The Tank’ have been Gameboy nights” (Cool Hunting, ep.5, 2006). This element of accessibility due to the sounds and hardware is the biggest drawcard and its downfall. In a world where digital technology is so accessible and everybody can make dance music an electronic music that is challenging to make and fun to listen to is a refreshing change.

    Circuit Bending has some interesting arguments about its validity that seem to apply to Chiptunes as well. In general experimental art forms should be allowed to do as they wish, but are they progressing the art world in general. Kitz (2004) believes that “one of the characteristics of a musical era in identity crisis is its enthusiasm for the retrospective, for remaking the work of others, and for using existing material in whole cloth but recast as a gimmick” (para.7.3). He continues by using Circuit Bending as an example of something that can easily be lost in gimmickry, as can Chiptunes. However for people to express themselves by choosing to not use a modern technology whether it appears a gimmick or not it is an attempt to try something new with something old. Circuit Bending is definitely an art form more than a musical style, and it achieves this well, however it does lend a lot to process and concept and very little to aesthetics of sound, which after all is what music should be about.

    Of the experimental music genres, concept holds Circuit Bending high above the others in terms of accessibility. Even though the sounds may be very similar to various experimental music genres, the gimmick nature Kitz mentioned is what makes the general public interested.  People of all ages can have a go at Circuit Bending and with festivals like BENT at ‘The Tank’ in New York, people can go learn how to do it and then see performances. The performances are than completely accessible because the audience understands what is going on.

Mike Rosenthal from ‘The Tank’ has this to say on the topic,

 

We do a lot of experimental music here [The Tank], a lot of laptop music and we wanted something more accessible to the general public. The people that generally come here are interested in electronic music, and the general public see it, they see a person with a laptop they don’t know what’s happening…Circuit Bending opens it up (Garcia, 2004).

 

As mentioned previously Circuit Bending exists as an accessible experimental art form, however as a musical form to be listened to out of context, it does not work. However in performance Circuit Bending is one of the most interesting experimental musical forms.

    The results of my participant observation seem to all reinforce the previously mentioned ideas as well as revealing some things about myself. Firstly, it is challenging to compose with limited resources, to the point where I actually didn’t. I would limit myself in terms of sound sources, like using simple waveforms, but was still using software like Pro-Tools, which actually seems to defeat the point. The community notices as well, my song got a 2 out of 5 Gameboy review on 8bitcollective.com, and when transferred to the VORC podcast they labelled my song “Chip-Style”(VORC, n.d). This reflects the kind of elitist nature as it is clearly labelled as not being a authentic Chiptune. The performance piece that ran parallel to the paper was composed as mentioned on Nanoloop 2.0 with a Nintendo DS. This created issues as the DS is very modern technology and again I seemed to be using technology too advanced, even though it is limiting. I personally found it hard to break from the consumerist nature of using new technology. Interestingly the performance was very well accepted. The concert series it was in consisted of highly conceptual art and comments from several audience members reveal that my piece was fun, exciting and accessible. This all supports the notion that Chiptunes are an accessible and interesting musical genre.