2008 saw the release by 2-Player Productions of the critically acclaimed concert documentary, Reformat the Planet. The film chronicles the rise of the chip tune scene in New York City, and documents the events of 2006’s first annual international Blip Festival. Chip tune is a subgenre of techno that, in its most basic form, seeks to emulate the sound and style of classic 8-bit videogame soundtracks, specifically those linked to the Nintendo Entertainment System. To that end, the primary instruments of chip tune artists tend to be video game consoles themselves, most frequently the Game Boy handheld system. With this device and one of many compatible, specially made synthesizer cartridges, chip tune musicians can compose and perform entire songs and even concerts using the technical capacities of the Game Boy. The chip tune movement is as much fueled by nostalgia for “retro gaming” as it is by a pervasive D.I.Y. ethos and pragmatic utilitarianism. Most chip tune artists grew up with the videogame systems in question, and in fact, it is their possession of said systems that often prompt their venturing into the chip tune genre in the first place. While the Game Boy platform may not have been designed initially with the distinct function of music creation or display in mind, the system’s capacities and limitations have seen it endure surprisingly well, and adapt to the creative endeavors its fans would impose upon it.
To appreciate the utility of the Game Boy as a music synthesizing tool, it is important to look back to its inception, to how the circumstances dictating its initial lifespan shaped its form, function and technical capabilities. Coming out in the wake of the Nintendo Entertainment System’s 1985 release, the Nintendo Game Boy (1989) was essentially conceived and designed as a stripped down, portable version of its home console predecessor. The handheld’s physical design in particular purposefully sought to emulate the look and feel of the NES. Both systems were designed with a sparse, economical control scheme limited to eight basic means of input: the four-pointed directional pad, the A and B action buttons, and the less prominent “Start” and “Select” buttons. Though these controls were very much a product of their time, conveying the state of technological advancement and general game design, their simplicity would endure for years and throughout changing trends, instilling in designers of hardware and software an appreciation for tactile economy.
For the NES, these controls streamlined the accessibility of the system’s most prevalent genres: side-scrolling platformers and top-down Role Playing Games. Both game genres’ controls were primarily centered on the range of movement afforded by the D-pad. A platformer would often rely exclusively on the right and left directional prompts for movement, the up and down buttons often being relegated to contextual commands like entering doorways or descending, and the A/B buttons triggering interaction and navigation of the game’s two dimensional virtual environment. RPGs used the D-pad’s full range of movement options to explore larger, grid based settings, moving about in all four directions and activating conversations and events with the same buttons that elsewhere had your character jump and attack. Furthermore, RPGs frequently made use of layered menu command structures, typically triggered in “battles” or by the “Start” and “Select” buttons, to incorporate greater degrees of nuanced choice and strategy. Through these affordances and limitations of control schemes, both genres were also defined by a general sense of pace, with platformers utilizing significantly faster movements than the relatively sluggish pace of RPGs, where concentrated planning and organization were more crucial to the games’ designs. Between these two genres, the puzzle game genre utilized a blend of controls, with the likes of Tetris requiring platformer speed reflexes and RPG style navigation skills.
Overall and for their time, the more meditative games were better suited to the Game Boy’s particular technical advantages and limitations. With the RPG, where extensive playtime could be a greater factor than in more frenetic platformers, the handheld was well suited to oblige with its extensive battery life. This asset stemmed from the console’s relatively weak technical specs, a reality more eloquently illustrated when the system was compared to its various competitors, most notably the Sega Game Gear. While the Game Boy has always lagged behind its contemporaries in terms of technical power (a trend that has defined nearly every piece of Nintendo hardware; Thiruvathukal, 28), its stripped down internal design better suited the mobile freedom the system afforded. Again, this was to the benefit of those games that one would engage with for extended period at a time (see latter-day Game Boy title, Pokemon).
Still, the system’s technical deficiency was always apparent in terms of its screen. With the power-saving design choice to forgo an internally backlit screen, the Game Boy was often at the mercy of whatever natural lighting conditions the player happened to find themselves in. A lack of light would make gameplay impossible, while irregular and excess lighting could result in the frustrating presence of glare off the screen. As a result, a productive Game Boy play session would tend to have the player remaining in a single, consistently lit location, a necessity that did somewhat infringe on the system’s promise of “go anywhere gaming.” Still, and again, this was a necessity that games like RPGs were keen to meet. In games where players were required to exert attention to specific details, a static location devoid of external distractions was often the ideal environment for gameplay.
All these capacities and limitations inherent in the original Game Boy point towards a highly intimate gaming platform, one that, to reiterate, the handheld’s physical design well lent itself towards. While the essential mechanics of the Game Boy’s controls derived from the NES controller, subtle layout configurations belied the differences in the two system’s implied playing environments. Where the NES controller was a horizontal rectangle with level, spaced out button arrangement, the Game Boy appears purposefully cramped. All means of input are shoved to the bottom half of a vertical rectangular interface, and the buttons themselves are aligned diagonally to accommodate this new surface area. Interaction with this device forces the player to have both hands in tight proximity to one another, practically cradling the system between them. Given the greater sensitivity of the device’s internal machinations (relative to those of a console controller; Nintendo handhelds in fact have a reputation for their durability and functional lifespan), it makes sense that the Game Boy would subtly put its player in the position of carefully handling it.
Then there is the matter of the system’s small, 160x144 pixel screen, which wielded a pallet of 4 separate shades of grey. Though capable of rendering distinct sprites and detailed environments, the scale of the screen naturally invited players to inspect it closely, which when paired with the aforementioned holding scheme typically amounted to a play experience where the Game Boy was positioned either up and close in front of the player’s face, or down and towards their lap. Despite the relative disparity in form, this means of experiencing the Game Boy put it functionally in close proximity with books, a formal relation that hammered home the recreational purposes of the device.
To appreciate the utility of the Game Boy as a music synthesizing tool, it is important to look back to its inception, to how the circumstances dictating its initial lifespan shaped its form, function and technical capabilities. Coming out in the wake of the Nintendo Entertainment System’s 1985 release, the Nintendo Game Boy (1989) was essentially conceived and designed as a stripped down, portable version of its home console predecessor. The handheld’s physical design in particular purposefully sought to emulate the look and feel of the NES. Both systems were designed with a sparse, economical control scheme limited to eight basic means of input: the four-pointed directional pad, the A and B action buttons, and the less prominent “Start” and “Select” buttons. Though these controls were very much a product of their time, conveying the state of technological advancement and general game design, their simplicity would endure for years and throughout changing trends, instilling in designers of hardware and software an appreciation for tactile economy.
For the NES, these controls streamlined the accessibility of the system’s most prevalent genres: side-scrolling platformers and top-down Role Playing Games. Both game genres’ controls were primarily centered on the range of movement afforded by the D-pad. A platformer would often rely exclusively on the right and left directional prompts for movement, the up and down buttons often being relegated to contextual commands like entering doorways or descending, and the A/B buttons triggering interaction and navigation of the game’s two dimensional virtual environment. RPGs used the D-pad’s full range of movement options to explore larger, grid based settings, moving about in all four directions and activating conversations and events with the same buttons that elsewhere had your character jump and attack. Furthermore, RPGs frequently made use of layered menu command structures, typically triggered in “battles” or by the “Start” and “Select” buttons, to incorporate greater degrees of nuanced choice and strategy. Through these affordances and limitations of control schemes, both genres were also defined by a general sense of pace, with platformers utilizing significantly faster movements than the relatively sluggish pace of RPGs, where concentrated planning and organization were more crucial to the games’ designs. Between these two genres, the puzzle game genre utilized a blend of controls, with the likes of Tetris requiring platformer speed reflexes and RPG style navigation skills.
Overall and for their time, the more meditative games were better suited to the Game Boy’s particular technical advantages and limitations. With the RPG, where extensive playtime could be a greater factor than in more frenetic platformers, the handheld was well suited to oblige with its extensive battery life. This asset stemmed from the console’s relatively weak technical specs, a reality more eloquently illustrated when the system was compared to its various competitors, most notably the Sega Game Gear. While the Game Boy has always lagged behind its contemporaries in terms of technical power (a trend that has defined nearly every piece of Nintendo hardware; Thiruvathukal, 28), its stripped down internal design better suited the mobile freedom the system afforded. Again, this was to the benefit of those games that one would engage with for extended period at a time (see latter-day Game Boy title, Pokemon).
Still, the system’s technical deficiency was always apparent in terms of its screen. With the power-saving design choice to forgo an internally backlit screen, the Game Boy was often at the mercy of whatever natural lighting conditions the player happened to find themselves in. A lack of light would make gameplay impossible, while irregular and excess lighting could result in the frustrating presence of glare off the screen. As a result, a productive Game Boy play session would tend to have the player remaining in a single, consistently lit location, a necessity that did somewhat infringe on the system’s promise of “go anywhere gaming.” Still, and again, this was a necessity that games like RPGs were keen to meet. In games where players were required to exert attention to specific details, a static location devoid of external distractions was often the ideal environment for gameplay.
All these capacities and limitations inherent in the original Game Boy point towards a highly intimate gaming platform, one that, to reiterate, the handheld’s physical design well lent itself towards. While the essential mechanics of the Game Boy’s controls derived from the NES controller, subtle layout configurations belied the differences in the two system’s implied playing environments. Where the NES controller was a horizontal rectangle with level, spaced out button arrangement, the Game Boy appears purposefully cramped. All means of input are shoved to the bottom half of a vertical rectangular interface, and the buttons themselves are aligned diagonally to accommodate this new surface area. Interaction with this device forces the player to have both hands in tight proximity to one another, practically cradling the system between them. Given the greater sensitivity of the device’s internal machinations (relative to those of a console controller; Nintendo handhelds in fact have a reputation for their durability and functional lifespan), it makes sense that the Game Boy would subtly put its player in the position of carefully handling it.
Then there is the matter of the system’s small, 160x144 pixel screen, which wielded a pallet of 4 separate shades of grey. Though capable of rendering distinct sprites and detailed environments, the scale of the screen naturally invited players to inspect it closely, which when paired with the aforementioned holding scheme typically amounted to a play experience where the Game Boy was positioned either up and close in front of the player’s face, or down and towards their lap. Despite the relative disparity in form, this means of experiencing the Game Boy put it functionally in close proximity with books, a formal relation that hammered home the recreational purposes of the device.
Through these formal and technical appraisals of the Game Boy, we have established the manner by which interaction with the device can be a focused and intimate endeavor. Such utility would ultimately make it a surprisingly viable candidate for independently produced music software like Little Sound DJ. This program, while coming packaged in the form of a standard Game Boy cartridge, puts on no pretense of being a game: booting up the system takes you directly into the main menus of the program. Likewise, there’s no aesthetic at work with the program’s design, no graphical user interface to conveniently facilitate use. LSDJ is bare of superfluous elements and dense in its arrangement of its core aspects, all of which are accessible via the aforementioned RPG style menu systems. That said, there is a surprising degree of intuition at work regarding the manner by which one interacts with the program, given the limited controls a hand.
The first screen one encounters when using LSDJ is the song screen, a four columned grid that represents the song a player can synthesize and edit. Each of these columns represents one of the four sound channels available inherently in the Game Boy CPU. The first two channels are pulse wave channels, which generate variants of the classic square wave sound (that is, a sound wave where the alternation of the amplitude is instantaneous, resulting in square angles of the waveform) that typically characterizes the “blip-bloop” of videogame sound effects. Next is the wave channel, which utilizes far more versatile triangle and saw tooth waveforms to generate the more nuanced bass sounds of a game’s soundtrack. This is also the channel responsible for generating more ambitious sound effects such as sampled beats and speech samples. The final sound channel is the noise generator, which works in tandem with the wave channel as the Game Boy’s drum kit. The noise generator does exactly what it sounds like, alternating between variations of white and brown noise to create percussive rhythms and ambient sounds. Though this arrangement of channels does ultimately afford a significant degree of depth and complexity to musical compositions, the general appeal, as previously stated, lies in replicating or referencing the classical videogame compositions and sounds for which the system was originally intended. Quite often, even though the chip tune music scene has expanded to allow for more experimental variations, this adherence to a more minimalistic aesthetic can be construed as a self-imposed limitation of the platform.
Within each of the channels presented on the song screen, there is a descending hierarchy of interaction available. Each column consists of 255 possible slots for “chains,” which are extended musical segments that can consist of rhythms, melodies, or bass lines. Throughout the LSDJ program, each customized chain remains distinct, registered to a set number that can be entered in at any time and at any point of each channel column. The customized elements making up each chain are referred to as “phrases,” and comprise the actual bulk of the music synthesizing that takes place within the LSDJ program. Each individual phrase is made up of 16 16th notes, which can be assigned within the phrase screen to various note values and instrumental effects. The instrument screen allows the programmer to determine how each note is conveyed, offering options to adjust frequency and pitch, synthesized playback and note length, and the manner through which the sound is projected (sweep and pan between speakers). Beyond this, and at the final layer of the synthesizing process, is the table screen, which allows for the programming of effects like the imposition of amplitude envelops and the transposition of notes. These effects play out automatically over whatever phrase they are imposed upon, providing a convenient means of song construction as opposed to having each effect applied manually.
Within each of the channels presented on the song screen, there is a descending hierarchy of interaction available. Each column consists of 255 possible slots for “chains,” which are extended musical segments that can consist of rhythms, melodies, or bass lines. Throughout the LSDJ program, each customized chain remains distinct, registered to a set number that can be entered in at any time and at any point of each channel column. The customized elements making up each chain are referred to as “phrases,” and comprise the actual bulk of the music synthesizing that takes place within the LSDJ program. Each individual phrase is made up of 16 16th notes, which can be assigned within the phrase screen to various note values and instrumental effects. The instrument screen allows the programmer to determine how each note is conveyed, offering options to adjust frequency and pitch, synthesized playback and note length, and the manner through which the sound is projected (sweep and pan between speakers). Beyond this, and at the final layer of the synthesizing process, is the table screen, which allows for the programming of effects like the imposition of amplitude envelops and the transposition of notes. These effects play out automatically over whatever phrase they are imposed upon, providing a convenient means of song construction as opposed to having each effect applied manually.
Though the LSDJ program is conveyed entirely through static, interactive grids and screens, the overall progression of options, song-chain-phrase-instrument-table, does convey a virtual sense of space to the user. The space of LSDJ is defined by the functional, not graphical, boundaries existing between each screen (Montfort, 46). With each further screen option utilized, the programmer is in essence moving deeper into the musical composition, finessing and structuring it from the inside out. That the broader elements of the composition, those most apparent in the chains, are allowed modularity in such a way as to facilitate repetition speaks to the traditional nature of techno music: the gradual adding and stripping of layers to develop ambiance or build momentum. Even the functional means that LSDJ provides for song playback works towards this conception, with a press of the start button triggering a perpetual loop of the composition in progress.
On the other hand, the actual means for interacting with all these menus conveys a more linear sense of progression. I made the comparison of handling the Game Boy with reading a book earlier, and it’s especially true with regards to how progression through the editing steps is accomplished. To enter the chain screen from the song screen, you must insert a chain into one of the four channels using the A button, then hold down the Select button while navigating with right on the directional pad. This method is repeated on down to the Table screen, with progression backwards through the screens done the same way with the left D-pad button. The whole process feels more like turning back and forth through the pages of a book, a sense that’s compounded by the step sequencing process the LSDJ program utilizes. Each subsequent note, phrase, and chain is listed below the previous one, essentially necessitating that the user “read” down the screen comprehensively before proceeding to the next “page.”
In Racing the Beam, Nick Montfort clarifies the allowance that “it is often useful to think of a programming language or environment on top of an operating system as a platform, too.” (2) This layering of platforms is key to the functionality of LSDJ: in addition to working within the confines of the Game Boy, one sees within the program itself a layering of platforms, with each subsequent screen in the song-table progression operating within the statutes set by the previous screen. From this multiplatform arrangement, chip tune music is brought into the world, itself to be experienced and facilitated by various platforms, be they computer monitors and MP3 players or actual concert stages, like those of the Blip Festival. Like the music it produces, LSDJ is particularly striking thanks to the platform on which it operates. The nature of the platform, from the Game Boy to the LSDJ on into the music, influences the identity of that which it showcases, a correlation that fans of chip tune and much of modern new media enthusiastically embrace.
Works Cited
On the other hand, the actual means for interacting with all these menus conveys a more linear sense of progression. I made the comparison of handling the Game Boy with reading a book earlier, and it’s especially true with regards to how progression through the editing steps is accomplished. To enter the chain screen from the song screen, you must insert a chain into one of the four channels using the A button, then hold down the Select button while navigating with right on the directional pad. This method is repeated on down to the Table screen, with progression backwards through the screens done the same way with the left D-pad button. The whole process feels more like turning back and forth through the pages of a book, a sense that’s compounded by the step sequencing process the LSDJ program utilizes. Each subsequent note, phrase, and chain is listed below the previous one, essentially necessitating that the user “read” down the screen comprehensively before proceeding to the next “page.”
In Racing the Beam, Nick Montfort clarifies the allowance that “it is often useful to think of a programming language or environment on top of an operating system as a platform, too.” (2) This layering of platforms is key to the functionality of LSDJ: in addition to working within the confines of the Game Boy, one sees within the program itself a layering of platforms, with each subsequent screen in the song-table progression operating within the statutes set by the previous screen. From this multiplatform arrangement, chip tune music is brought into the world, itself to be experienced and facilitated by various platforms, be they computer monitors and MP3 players or actual concert stages, like those of the Blip Festival. Like the music it produces, LSDJ is particularly striking thanks to the platform on which it operates. The nature of the platform, from the Game Boy to the LSDJ on into the music, influences the identity of that which it showcases, a correlation that fans of chip tune and much of modern new media enthusiastically embrace.
Works Cited
- I FIght Dragons, Little Sound DJ 101 - Chiptune Creation Tutorial.. Youtube, 2011. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edKVmtY6S3E
- Jones, Steven E., Thiruvathukal, George K., Codename Revolution: The Nintendo Wii Platform. Cambridge, Mass, MIT Press: 2012.
- Kotlinski, Johan, Little Sound DJ v3.7.4. Operating Manual. http://www.littlesounddj.com/lsd/latest/documentation/LSDj_3_7_4.pdf :2007.
- McFerren, Damien, "Retrospection Game Boy." Mean Machine Magazine. http://www.meanmachinesmag.co.uk/media/32/damiens-writing.php
- Montfort, Nick, Racing the Beam. Cambridge, Mass, MIT Press: 2009.