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Last edited by Feryl (Feb 19, 2024 9:22 pm)
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Austin, Texas
This doesn't seem very well-researched…
SFWeekly wrote:
But it was the Yellow Magic Orchestra, a pioneering Tokyo synth-pop group who made their living selling records, not games, that would bring the sounds of games into the mainstream. In the late '70s and early '80s, prior to the release of Nintendo's Famicom / NES, YMO marshaled computer-aided synthesizer programming into jaunty compositions such as 1979's Rydeen, forming the framework for the soundtracks of the 8- and 16-bit gaming console generations. The resultant craze, dubbed "Technopop" in Japan, arrived just in time to influence 8-bit game composers searching for answers to the constrained audio capabilities of the NES, Sega's Master System, and other mid-'80s consoles.
Today, YMO's impact on gaming music, and on the melodic synthesizers of today's Electronic Dance Music, is undeniable. Chiptunes have gained a steady if behind-the-scenes influence on music that has found new life as the Nintendo-addicted Generations X and Y have moved into that coveted, influential 18-to-40 age demographic. Perhaps because of that demographic shift (and certainly owing a debt of gratitude to the access enabled by Bandcamp), chiptune artists have gained a greater foothold in the public consciousness.
This is a weird segue, and a link that is tenuous at best. Ryuichi Sakamoto and the rest of YMO were instrumental in their early adoption of powerful and complex synthesizers (they were the first band to tour with a full studio-size polymoog), exposing audiences to the instruments and modeling synthesizer use for adoption by later musicians. They also wrote a song called "Computer Games," which overtly references and acknowledges the influence of video game music on popular culture. But none of that is chiptune, and it really has nothing to do with anything else in the article.
SFWeekly wrote:
Chiptune and chiptune-inspired artists like the Advantage, Crystal Castles, Anamanaguchi, and Dan Deacon have re-purposed old electronics (likely using instructions found on the Interwebz) or utilized console emulation software (also prolly Interwebz). Some of these artists have gained a share of crossover success (Crystal Castles' two self-titled records both hit No. 6 on Billboard's U.S. Dance charts). Anamanaguchi, a New York chiptune band that plays fast-paced, Game Boy-enhanced power-pop, and have crept into wider consciousness after landing their track "Airbrushed" on EA's smash music game Rock Band and scoring the Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World game.
lol.
EDIT:
There is so much wrong here.
Here's the author's twitter, @nescience. It's going to take a lot of restraint for me to not directly tell him how bad this article is.
Last edited by Telerophon (Aug 26, 2012 2:49 pm)
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Gosford, Australia
honestly, it's not a bad article from the outside looking in imo
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Savannah, Georgia
well every article about chip isn't a bad article from the outside looking in, really
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Austin, Texas
It's superficially interesting and acceptable to a layperson, but at the end of the day it is just factually inaccurate and marginalizing.
I'm actually mad about this, and I feel silly for actually being mad. If anything, this'll just keep people who aren't savvy enough to do their own research and to not take this sort of excrement as gospel far enough away to not gunk up the scene.
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Gosford, Australia
the way i see it, people who want new music to listen to or an interesting show to see aren't really part of "the scene" - and this goes for anything, not just chip music.
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AANABAY01
YMO were influential to game soundtracks because of their fun pop-but-light-jazzish style which has been recreated countless times by JRPG soundtrackers. but lol if more than 4% of the touring gameboy riders can make anything that sounds remotely like Rydeen ever
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Austin, Texas
For real; they were composing, recording, and performing with the most powerful, novel, and expensive electronic instruments available at the time. Their instrumentation really isn't comparable to anything home computers or toy platforms could do until the late 90s.
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Sweden
I don't think the point was to compare instrumentation, but the compositional qualities, in which case I'd agree they were very influential (to japanese vg music).
Last edited by boomlinde (Aug 26, 2012 4:11 pm)
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Austin, Texas
Ah. That segue is so abrupt and disjointed that I didn't clearly pick up on what the author was trying to posit as the connection between the two.
I would definitely agree that YMO are a massive influence on Japanese popular music and Japanese VGM by proxy. I found the author jumping to YMO directly from C64 VGM, and then from YMO to post-device-lifecycle popular music using video game sound textures and instrumentation to be rather confusing.
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uhajdafdfdfa
the scene itself has tried to get together and write articles about chipmusic at times, see the wikipedia page as it was and maybe still is. it was kind of hard work and no one agreed with each other.
if you are brave enough to stand up and take the inevitable flak for presenting your own experience of chip as absolute truth then go ahead and write some articles about it, become our "PR guy", maybe it will be better than this, maybe it won't. my point is, whatever you write about chip music, most people aren't going to agree with it.
that said, some of this is horrible:
- "crack open a couple of Game Boys and rewire the sound modules"
- the semicoherent tech talk about instruction sets of chipsets and procurement of an assembly language development system (??)
- the focus on YMO as the Source of All Music
so, maybe someone from inside the scene could do better. but none of us have a full understanding of all aspects of chip music and we are probably liable to write the same kind of crap about some areas (or ignore them completely)
this isn't a bad effort given the complexity of the subject matter and the (i am assuming very limited) amount of time they had to research it (edit: most of us have spent YEARS researching chip music! they probably spent a few days). but it's not a good article either!
Last edited by ant1 (Aug 26, 2012 5:39 pm)
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Brunswick, GA USA
I apologize in advance if tFa (emphasis on "F" intended) based YMO stuff on my cdbaby pages. (I doubt it, but as disjointed as that is, anything is possible.)
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buffalo, NY
ant1 wrote:
this isn't a bad effort given the complexity of the subject matter and the (i am assuming very limited) amount of time they had to research it (edit: most of us have spent YEARS researching chip music! they probably spent a few days). but it's not a good article either!
THIS
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Austin, Texas
I'll agree that it's esoteric and hard to research as an outsider, and I certainly don't know anywhere near an expertise-level amount.
That said, how hard is it to find out on google that Anamanaguchi uses an NES, not a Game Boy?