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San Diego, CA

you can help her by taking this really quick, 8 question survey on chiptune! we'd really appreciate it!

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/WNGX8DQ

and for reference: she's in a creative non-fiction class and she decided to do her piece on chipmusic! big_smile

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California

Submitted my answers. I think you should change question 7's last choice to "Around 15 years or older" instead of "Around 15 years old," though.

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San Diego, CA

done! I was kind of in a rush when I made the survey hmm

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Philly, PA, USA

I don't like your girlfriend's survey, but i took it anyway. now I am mad about things. I will write my own essay about chiptune without surveys*!



*not really, I am lazy, and i'm not really mad anyway.

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Texas

I get that the survey needs to be short to avoid making people not want to take it, but it maybe should be a little more comprehensive. neutral Just sayin'.

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can i ask what the essay is about? the choice of questions was interesting

curiosity

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Psydney, Australia

Agreed that the questions were kinda unexpected smile
Good luck to your gf

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Westfield, NJ

Now I feel old for being 26.

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San Diego, CA

a couple caveats:

we're not looking for incredibly hard/comprehensive data, so the survey was designed to get people to answer it rather than designing it toward encompassing everything.

the reason it's skewed toward younger ages is because that's the population we're interested in! she's trying to explore that weird cultural area of people into chiptune that are too young to have really been influenced by lo-bit sounds. if the reason so many people are into chiptune is because they're nostalgic for the sound aesthetic, then the ages of chiptune enthusiasts should keep getting older and older, but younger people are still getting into it!

the video game questions are in there to kind of evaluate the "gamerness" of the people taking the survey. there's a hypothesis that she (and I) are throwing around that deals with the "kind" of gamer that enjoys chiptune to a point where they would make the music, and we're trying to see whether that hypothesis holds at all. we're thinking that the stereotype of a person who enjoys chiptune would be both a. over 20 (so that they have some basis for what low-bit music entails) and b. has played old games and has nostalgia for them. obviously this hypothesis won't be 100% accurate, and I'm personally hoping that it's actually false because the alternative is MUCH more interesting big_smile

the paper she's writing isn't a thesis or a scientific paper exactly, despite my use of the word hypothesis -- she's leaning more toward the anthropological study route in that she's immersed in the culture, rather than taking an outsider's perspective. the problem is that we personally don't know any young chiptune fans here in San Diego, so we decided to put together a survey to make sure that those hypotheses above at least have SOME basis in reality and we're not just making it up smile

and don't worry -- she's already very aware of the issues surrounding articles on chiptune written by people who aren't really into the culture. there will be no "mario at a rave" mentioned here, I promise.

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Westfield, NJ

I think this is cool. It's time for someone to debunk the notion that "people listen to chiptune because of nostalgia."

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Tokyo, Japan
spacetownsavior wrote:

the reason it's skewed toward younger ages is because that's the population we're interested in! she's trying to explore that weird cultural area of people into chiptune that are too young to have really been influenced by lo-bit sounds. if the reason so many people are into chiptune is because they're nostalgic for the sound aesthetic, then the ages of chiptune enthusiasts should keep getting older and older, but younger people are still getting into it!

Faux nostalgia is indeed an odd cultural phenomenon.

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BOSTON

LOL AT 25+

thats some thin demographics

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Tokyo, Japan

Yah, if that survey were done in Tokyo, everyone would be over 25.

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Florida

I wasn't alive for most of the 80's (b. 1987...) but I have a weird sense of nostalgia for 80s culture. I think it had a lot to do with being raised in a not-very-wealthy family so we were always behind the tech curve by 5ish years. Got a NES when the SNES came out, etc. We still don't have cable or broadband here. (thank God for friendly neighbors...)

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.FILTHadelphia
Decktonic wrote:

Now I feel old for being 26.

This.

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San Diego, CA
BR1GHT PR1MATE wrote:

LOL AT 25+

thats some thin demographics

again, we're not so much concerned with age. we're just assuming that if you're over 25 you've been alive to see/hear/play on most of the technology that chiptune is made on. we're not doing an exhaustive demographic study -- we're just trying to see if you were alive at the same time these old game consoles were being sold. the data doesn't really need any resolution higher than that, so we just never put it in, because even if we added more categories for stuff like 25-30, 30-40, 45+, we'd just lump them all together under the category "has been around for old video game systems" anyway!

so chill out guys we're not calling you old sheesh