The art of music with chips

Like most of you, I also enjoyed Reformat The Planet. Before watching the movie, I had no idea that there was such a thing as chiptunes or 8-bit music. I was pretty fascinated by the fact that people were creating music through simple devices such as gameboys! It reminded me of the saying “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure”. I could care less about my gameboy, in fact, I don’t even know where it is. But like we mentioned in class, there are people who treat these video game consoles as instruments that are vital to their lives. I read an article on an interview with the band Anamanaguchi. One of the band members mention that “it’s more than nostalgia that drives the dedicated chip musician with their modified Nintendo instruments”. In today’s society, innovation is on the rise. People are becoming very creative especially in the way they choose to create art. It’s crazy how an old gameboy, that was used solely to play games, can now create a work of art. What's even more fascinating is with the simple tweak of these video game consoles, you go from being a player, to becoming an artist. One of the band members explains the process on how they create this type of music. He claimed that it was such a hard, complicated process when messing around with the chips and wires. However, their elemental love of digital synthesis leads these artists to deal with this complex hardware that are prone to crashing. The whole process from reformatting these chips to performing 8-bit music is an incredible artistic process that transforms a gamer to an artist.

http://createdigitalmusic.com/2009/08/the-art-of-music-with-chips-behind-the-scenes-with-8-bit-band-anamanaguchi/