8Bit Symposium @ the University of Guelph

looks pretty decent to me!

You seemed to really gloss over the invention of the tracker.  You kinda went from Ultimate Soundtracker straight to Famitracker.  You also made it seem like chipmusic started in New York city in 2001.  Really, the chip scene in New York was a culmination and a spilling over of a scene that had been growing within the Amiga and DOS tracker scene since the very beginning of the tracker.  I think mentioning a little bit about how the Amiga tracker scene started.

I didn't really include any sources, and some people might disagree with what I put down as important, but I've given a rough outline of the important growth points leading up to New York's scene.  Anyone else here feel free to correct me or add whatever.

(Also, don't feel obligated to use any or all of this.  Just take what you can or want to.)
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Ultimate Soundtracker was very important for a couple reasons.  Sure it was the first real tracker but more importantly it came with a bunch of floppy discs (the ST discs) that included samples.  Back in the day good sampling hardware was a bit expensive and the quality wasn't very high.  So people shared those good sounding samples found on the ST discs.  The samples on those discs are still commonly used in sample-tracker music.  Soundtracker had some functionality issues though (like a low limit on the number of samples you could use, and forcing you to put your lead, bass, drums, etc in their own channel, rather than having flexibility)

Very soon Ultimate Soundtracker was hacked for better functionality and released as NoiseTracker.  The .MOD format that was used became very popular it's modular nature made it a very small file, easily shared on floppies or via the early internet.  It's also an important format to chipmusic in general because it was here that those fast chord-arps became popular.  Due to the 4 channel limitations, forming chords could be difficult, so cycling very quickly through the notes in the chord would allow one channel to sound somewhat chordal.  In fact, many of the quirks of chipmusic composition are inherent to the tracker format and became popularized in this era.

The first hints of chip music itself also started here in the Amiga scene.  To keep file sizes very small (and to add an interested sound), some musicians used very small simple waveforms (square waves, triangle, noise samples, etc) in their music.  These were usually made from scratch in a similar fashion to how LSDJ does it's wave drawing.  [thanks 4mat] These sounds often gave these tracks a sound very similar to pure chip music.

As the tracker scene grew, so did technology.  Eventually it came to pass that the Amiga was falling from favour and DOS based computers were becoming far more popular.  Three trackers came to power here, and each has it's own merits (though the users of each would disagree that the other two had any worth).  Impulse Tracker, Scream Tracker, and Fast Tracker 2 (FT 1 was less popular).  Each expanded on the .MOD format in a different way and created three (somewhat) incompatible format.  .IT, .S3M, and .XM respectively.

More important to the chipmusic scene, though, was the relative proliferation of inexpensive sound samplers.  Samples were becoming easier to make and with the internet still growing, were being shared around like crazy.  Because of the chip-esque sounds that were already becoming popular, some people began emulating their favourite video game soundtracks.  They would sample the actual chiptune hardware and then track the song out in their tracker of choice.

This gives less powerful sound manipulation options than using the actual hardware, though.  Programs like Soundtracker (a different program than Ultimate SoundTracker, which ran on the ZX Spectrum) and others like it for other 8bit computers already allowed people to take advantage of chiptune hardware.  However, those were open development platforms.  What about the NES?  The Game Boy?  Like everything in the computer world, it was only a matter of time before homebrew moved in.

I'm not sure if it was the absolute first game boy music application, but it's one of the most popular;  Nanoloop stepped onto the scene in '98.  Two years later, LSDJ.

You pretty much pick up after that.

Last edited by jefftheworld (Feb 2, 2011 8:10 pm)

Well actually the original chipmod scene of late '80s-early '90s were drawing their own 32-byte waves and manipulating chipsounds "the right way". (infact pretty much the same way the Gameboy's triangle channel does it, and a few other devices)   It's only in the mid-'90s onwards that people were sampling whole c64 instruments and using them just like a normal sample.  Amusingly when people yell "fakebit" at tracker stuff it's the latter method that's far more accurate to that term.

Very interesting.

I'll add a little bit of the Amiga history onto it for a modern influence, but for time constraint purposes I decided from the outset to not go in-depth into the techniques of the preceding technologies. I'm focusing on the contemporary growth of the genre, with an emphasis on the Nintendo gameboy and famicom, and while early influence is important, it's not necessary to analyze offshoots of technologies (such as sampling).

I find 4mat's comment interesting, as it relates directly to the gameboy's triangle wave synthesis.

Good stuff, though!

there's more.
jefftheworld, who will be playing outside for nuit blanche with many others in TO , for example
and Toy Company deserves cred, even if it doesn't happen in ontario

it's just a suggestion. it's just seems your talk is US centric is all.

Last edited by Battle Lava (Feb 2, 2011 9:46 pm)