What Fresh Hell is THIS?!?!?!
PLAGIARIZED I SAY
http://8bitcollective.com/images/GonZo/Donkey+Kong+IN+REAL+LIFE%21%21/
This guy…he basically ripped my idea and my title! This is quite an interesting little development; I think it’s a little too similar to be happenstance. I’ll post a comment and see what happens…maybe we’ll see how the Creative Commons licensed 8-bit community takes to this kind of thing…
DKIRL: My Meager Contribution to the 8-bit Community
Here goes nothing…click the jump to see the fruits of my labor.
Lurking Among the 8 Bit Collective
Thus far, my interest in the genre of music known as chiptunes has led me to discover a thriving underground culture based around the old 8-bit video game aesthetic. This nostalgic community uses 8 bit sound and visualizations to create unique art.
However, breaking into the community might be somewhat more difficult than I thought. If there’s one thing I learned with my last travelogue on Anonymous, it’s that one should always get a sense of the community before joining and actually contributing to it. While the chiptune community certainly seems more accepting than Anonymous and 4chan, it’s also extremely intimidating. Some of the tracks on the first page posted by “amateur” chiptune artists were, at least compared to the glitchy crap I’ve tried to produce, extremely good, and a lot of the pictures posted are photos from heavily populated chiptune shows. Creating a media event slightly more significant than starting a “lol wats ur fave videa gaem” thread may prove somewhat difficult. This week is probably going to be me devoting myself to creating something worthy of commentary, good or bad, and focusing on the results. Although I’m intimidated, most of the feedback given on the site seems to be positive and kind of “feel-good”. There’s a specific section of the forum for “constructive criticism”, and it looks like any criticism at all is kept there.
Hopefully I can come up with something that’ll at the very least gather some attention.
Also, apparently all the submissions on the site are done so under a Creative Commons license. It’s great to see a young community using this hallmark of the digital age; hopefully other music scenes will follow.
The 8bitpeoples
Software? Check. Synth Pack? Check. Talent? Uhh…
Well, over break I attempted to journey into the world of chiptune creation. YouTube was my primary source of information in getting the proper programs to make a quick song, but the process is fairly complicated. Here’s the video I looked at:
As you can probably tell from the somewhat complex appearance of the program, it’s taking me a while to get used to the way things work. Shaping the actual sound wave of the note is a new concept to me, and although the video makes it look easy, I’m having trouble piecing together anything that really sounds like music. To make matters worse, I’m getting all kinds of conflicting results on what the best software to work with is. Itt looks like I could possibly be able to play some chiptunes on my Nintendo DS, with the proper emulators and ROMs, but it could get complicated. As of right now I’m still trying to balance an authentic experience with the amount of talent it’s going to take to put something together.
Reformat the Planet
First off, sorry for the late post. It’s been a hell of a week.
Anyway, in searching for information about the chiptune scene, I came upon this trailer for an upcoming documentary entitled Reformat the Planet. It basically documents the ideologies and experiences of chiptune artists and fans. There’s plenty of little catchphrases within the trailer that hint at what I considered to be the crux of the movement - the nostalgia factor of hearing all of these old sounds placed within a new context. People in the trailer also made mention of using the technologies, but not really as I would describe it. One guy says, “It’s not reappropriating art, it’s celebrating the things about it that work”. The term “reappropriating” seems, in my experience, to be a term used by software pirates and hackers to legitimize their actions, so maybe the chiptune artists are trying to distance themselves from that. I’m not sure if Nintendo could sweep in and claim copyright on the soundboards of the GameBoy and Famicom, but I doubt they would anyway.
Also, I had no idea that the artists were actually mashing on their GameBoys on stage, since I’ve been too lazy to get out to a show since I’ve gotten in to the music. That’s awesome, in a really, really nerdy kind of way.
8-bit Shredding: The World of Chiptunes
 
