The Game Boy

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth B. McAlpine
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Low Cost ◽  
Musical Instruments ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Cultural Phenomenon ◽  
Video Game Music

This chapter examines the cultural phenomenon that was Nintendo’s Game Boy and suggests that its portability and low cost was pivotal in taking chiptune from primarily a desktop activity to something that could be taken onstage and gigged. Crucial to the Game Boy’s success was Tetris, the machine’s ‘killer app’. It was such a hit that its music made the transition from silicon to vinyl, demonstrating that video game music could be popular music in its own right. After the release of Nanoloop and Little Sound DJ in the late 1990s, musicians realized that the Game Boy was more than just a handheld gaming device; it was a cheap and very portable music workstation. The chapter concludes by looking at how this idea has driven a new wave of equipment hacking, as users have rediscovered and reinvented vintage consoles as musical instruments.

Bits and Pieces

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth B. McAlpine
Keyword(s):  
Video Game ◽  
Electronic Music ◽  
First Generation ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Musical Instruments ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Video Game Music ◽  
The Social ◽  
Home Computers ◽  
Video Game Consoles

This book explores the development of and the social, cultural, and historical context of chiptune, a form of electronic music that emerged from the first generation of video game consoles and home computers in the 1980s. Through a combination of musical and procedural analysis and practitioner interviews, the book explores the role the technical constraints of early video game hardware played in shaping the sound of 8-bit video game music and the inventive approaches to coding and composition musicians used to circumvent them. It examines the sounds, culture, and personalities behind the music and shows how chiptune links as closely to the music of Bach as to the aggressive posturing of punk or the driving electronic sounds of house. The book begins by looking at chiptune’s roots in video game music and discusses how, as the sound chips that gave rise to its distinctive voice were superseded by more sophisticated hardware, chiptune moved underground to become an important part of the demoscene, a networked community of digital artists. It discusses chiptune’s reemergence in the late 1990s as a new wave of young musicians rediscovered these obsolete machines and began to use them as quirky and characterful musical instruments, in the process taking chiptune from the desktop and placing it centre stage. The book concludes by contemplating what lies ahead; as more people incorporate the chiptune sound into their work, will it ever hit the mainstream or will it remain firmly countercultural as part of the digital underground?

Game Sound

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 100-102
Author(s):  
Karen Collins
Keyword(s):  
Video Game ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Sound Design ◽  
Video Game Music

Karen Collins reflects on her seminal volume Game Sound: An Introduction to the History, Theory, and Practice of Video Game Music and Sound Design, a little over a decade after its publication.

Chinese toms in the making of the drum kit: Localization and exoticism

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-242 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Music Education ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Musical Instruments ◽  
New Music ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Future ◽  
Late Nineteenth

The late nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth century saw the drum kit emerge as an assemblage of musical instruments that was central to much new music of the time and especially to the rise of jazz. This article is a study of Chinese drums in the making of the drum kit. The notions of localization and exoticism are applied as conceptual tools for interpreting the place of Chinese drums in the early drum kit. Why were distinctly Chinese drums used in the early drum kit? How did the Chinese drums shape the future of the drum kit? The drum kit has been at the heart of most popular music throughout the twentieth century to the present day, and, as such, this article will be beneficial to educators, practitioners and scholars of popular music education.

‘ROCK SPECTRALE’: THE CULTURAL IDENTITY OF THE ELECTRIC GUITAR IN TRISTAN MURAIL'S vampyr!

Tempo ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 69 (274) ◽  
pp. 22-32
Author(s):  
Ben Jameson
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Musical Instruments ◽  
New Music ◽  
Electric Guitar ◽  
Concert Music ◽  
Analytical Approaches

AbstractThe electric guitar is one of the most iconic musical instruments of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and, due to its ubiquitous use in much rock and popular music, it has developed a strong cultural identity. In recent years, as the electric guitar has become increasingly common in contemporary concert music, its cultural associations have inevitably shaped how composers, performers and listeners understand music performed on the instrument. This article investigates various issues relating to the electric guitar's cultural identity in the context of Tristan Murail's Vampyr! (1984), in the hope of demonstrating perspectives that will be useful in considering new music for the electric guitar more generally. The article draws both on established analytical approaches to Murail's spectral oeuvre and on concepts from popular music and cultural studies, in order to analyse the influence that the electric guitar's associations from popular culture have in new music.

scholarly journals Made in Yugoslavia: Studies in Popular Music

2021 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 271-282
Author(s):  
Laura Emmery
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
New Wave ◽  
World War ◽  
The West ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
History Of ◽  
Comprehensive Discussion ◽  
Made In

Made in Yugoslavia: Studies in Popular Music (edited by Danijela Špirić Beard and Ljerka Rasmussen) is a fascinating study of how popular music developed in post-World War II Yugoslavia, eventually reaching both unsurpassable popularity in the Balkans and Eastern Europe, and critical acclaim in the West. Through the comprehensive discussion of all popular music trends in Yugoslavia − commercial pop (zabavna-pop), rock, punk, new wave, disco, folk (narodna), and neofolk (novokomponovana) − across all six socialist Yugoslav republics, the reader is given the engrossing socio-cultural and political history of the country, providing the audience with a much-needed and riveting context for understanding the formation and the eventual demise of Tito’s Yugoslavia.

History of Video Game Music

2012 ◽  
pp. 11-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melanie Fritsch
Keyword(s):  
Video Game ◽  
Video Game Music ◽  
History Of

The Game Music Handbook

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Noah Kellman
Keyword(s):  
Programming Languages ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Deep Understanding ◽  
Visual Programming ◽  
Sound Design ◽  
Video Game Music ◽  
Compositional Field ◽  
Game State ◽  
Advanced Readers ◽  
The Relationship

Writing music for games is an art that requires conceptual forethought, specialized technical skill, and a deep understanding of how players interact with games and game audio. The Game Music Handbook embarks on a journey through numerous soundscapes throughout video game history, exploring a series of concepts and techniques that are key to being a successful game music composer. This book organizes key game music scoring concepts into an applicable methodology, describing them with memorable distinctions that leave readers with a clear picture of how to apply them to creating music and sound. Any music composer or musician who wishes to begin a career in game composition can pick up this text and quickly gain a solid understanding of the core techniques for composing video game music, as well as the conceptual differences that separate it from any other compositional field. Some of these topics include designing emotional arcs for nonlinear timelines, the relationship between music and sound design, discussion of the player’s interaction with audio, and more. There is also much to be gained by advanced readers or game audio professionals, who will find detailed discussion of game state and its effect on player interaction, a composer-centric lesson on programming, how to work with version control, information on visual programming languages, emergent audio, music for virtual reality (VR), procedural audio, and other indispensable knowledge about advanced reactive music concepts. The text often explores the effect that music has on a player’s interaction with a game. It discusses the practical application of this interaction through the examination of various techniques employed in games throughout video game history to enhance immersion, emphasize emotion, and create compelling interactive experiences.

Ludomusicology

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 13-35
Author(s):  
Juan Pablo Fernández-Cortés
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Current Situation ◽  
Academic Community ◽  
Ongoing Research ◽  
The Past ◽  
Video Game Music

In the past two decades, the study of video game music has come into its own and gained acceptance in the academic community. This subdiscipline, now commonly referred as ludomusicology, is still attempting basic questions concerning how it can be researched. This article aims to present the current situation and to reflect about some of the main lines of research related to the music of video games and their culture, a field of ongoing research that has received little attention in Hispanophone academia up to the present time. This article was originally published in Anuario Musical 75 (2020): 181–99 and has been translated for the Journal of Sound and Music in Games. https://doi.org/10.3989/anuariomusical.2020.75.09

Experience the Experimental

Contracultura ◽  
2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Dunn
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Active Participation ◽  
The Other ◽  
Experimental Writing ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Cultural Phenomenon ◽  
Mass Audience ◽  
Other Hand

Chapter 2 explores the connections between the artistic avantgarde and the counterculture. A small, but influential group of artists sometimes identified as “marginal” or “underground” coalesced in the aftermath of Tropicália. Cultura marginal may be located at the intersection of two cultural phenomenon: On one hand it had deep affinities with the emergent counterculture. On the other hand, cultura marginal was indebted to the mid-century constructivist avant-garde, especially neo-concretism. The author discusses the work of experimental artist, Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark, who developed a series of environmental and performative works that demanded the active participation of spectators to create meaning. The author explores Oiticica’s dialogue with experimental writer and songwriter, Waly Salomão, whose work circulated within the rarified field of experimental writing, while also finding a mass audience through popular music, notably in the performances of Gal Costa. The author devotes a section to the journalist and artist Torquato Neto, who promoted cultura marginal and also performed in “Nosferato no Brasil,” a celebrated example of Super 8 film. Finally, the author analyzes the publication Navilouca, a graphic and textual project that brought together key figures of cultura marginal and the avantgarde.

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