9. "New generation" chip music scene

Hello everyone, today is the ninth lesson in the "Introduction to the demoscene" series, and the last lesson on the topic of "Chip Music". In the previous two lessons of "Chip Music", we reviewed the origins of chip music's origin of 8-bit games and its development by demoscene, but today's lesson will focus on the part of chip music outside of the game and demoscene - specifically, the chip music community that is neither game music nor part of demoscene, as represented by LSDJ and Nanoloop from the mid to late 90s onwards.

Chip music doesn't always follow demoscene principles

In mainstream demoscene practice, the audiovisual effects of demo programs are defined after they are released. Demos usually have clear requirements for the computer platform on which they run, and program authors need to ensure that compo organizers are able to run their programs live and present them to the audience with the expected results, and any surprises and variables can lead to failure in the competition: the program may not run properly at the competition site or may not perform optimally.

For chip music authors, who also create executable music programs and basically follow the rules common to other categories of demoscene competitions, such restrictions on running platform, playing time, and program capacity apply to some extend. However, there is another audience-oriented context for their work, namely live performances. In the chip music scene, some musicians have built their reputation entirely on live performances without experience in producing executable music programs.

The 2013 book "Music and Game: Perspectives on a Popular Alliance" includes Matthias Pasdzierny's paper "Geeks on Stage? Investigations in the World of (Live) Chipmusic", which describes in some detail the emergence and development of chip music as a live performance.

In this paper, the author points out that there is a lot of ambiguity in the definition of "chip music" today, especially since the applications of sound chips are not limited to home computers and game consoles, but include toys, telephones, musical instruments, and so on.

But, as Carlsson himself mentions, such a classification harbours new problems, especially in further dissociation, e.g. because of soundchips having been assembled not just in game consoles and home computers, but also in toys, telephones, musical instruments (such as different kinds of electronic keyboards) and various other devices (ibid.).

He therefore focuses the discussion on "scenes" rather than "chips" and points to demoscene and Tracker as "open source" music production and communication as the key to the formation of the chip music scene: the MOD file holds all the samples used by the music producer and organizes them, arranges their structure, and allows everyone to modify and reuse them.

What made the trackers so attractive for the demoscene was the possibility to share the music in an open-source form. At the end of the composition or arranging process there was no need to export the music to a - in a certain way, closed - soundfile (often including a loss of sound quality), but the music existed (and was spread) as a module file (the so-called MOD), which contained all the used samples and pattern information and remained, in every way, editable for everyone.

The first generation of chip musicians who took hardware seriously

Overseas researchers largely acknowledge that the chip music "scene" was formed in the demoscene, and demoscene members formed the "first generation" of the chip music scene. They also point out that from the mid to late 1990s onwards, new chip music producers often ceased to be closely associated with the demoscene, and that the chip music scene gradually separated from the demoscene and became a new scene with its own activities, terminology and cultural symbols.

These new members of the demoscene are known as the "second" and "third" generation of chip music makers. In Matthias Pasdzierny's paper, the term "second generation" or "new school" is used to describe the newer, more performance-oriented, less technically oriented faction of the chip music scene that emerged around 2000; and Marilou Polymeropoulou's "Chipmusic, Fakebit and the Discourse of Authenticity in the Chipscene" adds a description of the "third generation" of chip musicians who are more culturally rebellious and disregardful of hardware characteristics.

"Geeks on Stage? Investigations in the World of (Live) Chipmusic" confirms a point we made at the beginning of this lesson, namely that chip music in its early days, rooted in the demoscene, initially followed a showcase process of programming and executing demos without live performance.

First one has to note that, in the beginning of the chipmusic scene, traditional live performances were immaterial or, in fact, did not exist. It was rather the programming itself that was considered as a performance, especially if, as usual in the demoscene, everybody brought their own computer system to the demoparty and publicly polished his or her demo to the last second. ...... In this respect, chiptuners take the independent life of computers seriously, or, as Daniel Botz writes, following the theories of Friedrich Kittler: "[Demos] are not based on purposes of shaping following an ideal form and realized with adequate computer technique. They are in terms of production and reproduction very closely connected to the possibilities and limitations of a particular piece of hardware. [...] The idea doesn't come first, but the machine."

The seriousness with which early chip musicians approached hardware was inherited from the demoscene, which explains the "loyalty" of many chip musicians to specific hardware, their willingness to spend more time and money on collecting and restoring older hardware and sound chips, and their considerable rejection of emulators. The same reasoning underpins the enduring popularity of oldskool demos and the retro-computing community.

Second generation chip musicians: embracing the conventions of popular music

The "second generation" or "new school" chip musicians mentioned in "Geeks on Stage" are probably closer to how we think of chip music today, at least in the sense that many of the tools they use are the ones that come up most frequently when we refer to chip music today, such as LSDJ and FamiTracker, to name a few. And there are many differences between them and the demoscene, both in terms of community culture and practice characteristics.

Unlike the demoscene, the so-called "second generation" or "new school" of chipmusicians (Dittbrenner 2007: 116, Yabsley 2007: 15), from its beginning around the year 2000, has been much more open to conventions and communities of popular music. New tracker programs, first of all LSDj for Game Boy as well as NES/Famicom-trackers like MCK/MCKC and FamiTracker, have made it possible to focus on just playing with the sounds and the possible application of the systems as instruments for live music performances rather than only on technical backgrounds – the reason why some parts of the demoscene coined the snide term "cubase-chipmusicians" (Carlsson 2007: 156). Since this performance-oriented scene emerged, the terminology has also changed. For example, the definition of the term chipmusic has been widened: "Ideally, it should be danceable music with square waves. I would say that's the new millennium (stereo) type of chipmusic. And the purists grunt..." (Carlsson 2010: 5) Sometimes the term fakebit (instead of 8-bit) occurs in this context, defining music which uses the sound of 1980s chipmusic but is completely produced with regular modern samplers, synthesizers and sequencer programs.

From the 1980s to the 1990s, chip music derived a range of software, practices and methods from the demoscene. However, the most important hallmark of chip music from the late 1990s to around 2000 was the "exodus" from the demoscene and the incorporation of more pop music features, a period when the chip music scene focused on sound beyond hardware. An extreme of this attempt was "sound without hardware". As the name "Cubase chip musicians" describes, "fake chip" musicians used a lot of digital audio workstation (DAW) software for their productions, not necessarily using real sound chips, and often did not understand the programmable nature of sound chips.

The emergence of "fake chip" among the second generation of chip musicians is probably the most controversial topic in the chip music world today, and the controversy continues to this day, although among the "third generation" of chip musicians to be introduced later, "Fake Chip" has a higher degree of acceptance than any previous generation of participants.

The core reason why "Cubase chip musicians" are criticized by demoscene members is not simply a difference in attitude towards hardware or technical background. The conflict between them is actually a conflict of values between the non-commercial ethics promoted by the demoscene and the compatibility of digital audio software with commercial production.

In "Playing new music with old games: The chiptune subculture", the expletive "Fuck Pro Tools", which is popular in the chip music community, is mentioned to explain the attitude of a significant portion of chip musicians toward digital audio software.

As we can see in the hacker/punk implications pointed above, chiptune artists tend to present themselves as inherently subversive. From the oppositional standpoint they claim, they disregard the latest technological developments, upgrades, sound and 3D graphic cards. Also, they tend to oppose the idea of the "planned obsolescence" , which has proved to be one of the best ways to control and manipulate the masses through technology, especially in the digital age. They prefer old computers and gaming devices to the latest digital audio workstations. "Fuck Pro Tools", as the member of the micromusic online community said.

Nanoloop

Among the most influential production tools developed by the "second generation" of chip musicians are Nanoloop and LSDJ. Unlike most Trackers, which created and shaped the chip music scene as mentioned in the previous two lessons, Nanoloop and LSDJ were not developed by enthusiasts in the demoscene. They are considered to be the work of an independent kind of chip music scene that started in the late 90s, and their choice of platform stems from the huge success of the Game Boy in the mass market.

In an interview with the German online electronic music magazine MEMI, Nanoloop author Oliver Wittchow has a clear explanation of his starting point and motivation for developing the software, confirming that Nanoloop emerged as a thesis project for art school students. At the same time Oliver had no programming experience when he started creating Nanoloop, much less being a professional developer.

However, Nanoloop didn't just appear out of nowhere; the amateur developer community around the Game Boy had already grown considerably before Nanoloop appeared in 1998, and Oliver explicitly mentions in the interview that a BASIC interpreter and a C compiler on the Game Boy were available to homebrew developers around 1996.

In the interview, Oliver also mentioned a series of software synthesizers that inspired Nanoloop, including JavOICe, Generator (Reaktor), and Super Collider.

These three software programs basically covered the various groups of software synthesizer development at the time: JavOICe was a research project by Peter Meijer, a scientist working at Philips at the time, and was developed primarily to provide visual aids for the visually impaired to sonify the picture; Generator started as a software synthesizer for music composition in the late 90s; while SuperCollider began as an academic project at Texas State University to develop a programming language for music synthesis. The project was open-sourced in 2002 and has evolved since.

Although Oliver uses software developed by demoscene, such as Fasttracker, he does not consider his work to be in the "demoscene style" and his reasons for using FastTracker are entirely functional. Also Oliver ruled out any relationship with Nintendo, the developer of the Game Boy, in the interview, including official development tools or access to cartridge licensing.

LSDJ

The emergence of LSDJ is more closely tied to the demoscene than that of Nanoloop. In a 2012 interview, LSDJ author Johan Kotlinski mentioned that some of his friends were members of the Swedish Hack'n'Trade demo group and that they all shared the same interest in Commodore 64 and Amiga music, while he also mentions having used Musicline Editor, a music production tool that runs on Amiga computers, which was also developed by demoscene.

In another interview from 2020, Johan describes the situation more specifically, mentioning another musician, Anders "Goto80" Carlsson, who was a member of Hack'n'Trade.

Like many others in Sweden, I grew up with Commodore 64 and Amiga and so got accustomed to these sounds early on. Early 90s, I learned Protracker and shared .mod files on bulletin board systems, and made friends over FidoNet who shared my taste in music; mostly the techno/house/IDM stuff that were popular back then.

......

In mid 90s, I started to use a new synthetic music program for Amiga named Musicline Editor. I don't think it ever got popular, since at this time people were switching to PC and Playstation. I liked it a lot though. Compared to Protracker, it was possible to create new sounds rather than just using samples. Also, the vertical workflow made it easier for me to actually finish songs. I made a lot of music, had fun and mail-swapped tapes with the few people I found who were at all interested in listening.

In 2000, I printed the 7″ vinyl "Papaya EP" with Commodore 64 music made by my friend Goto80. Surprisingly enough, people liked it enough to sell a thousand copies. I think it inspired us both to put more effort into what we were doing.

It was around this time I started to make some kind of music program for the Game Boy Color, which turned out to be surprisingly fun. I named it Little Sound Dj, sold cartridges over the internet and to a local record store. I found more like-minded people in Stockholm and on the Internet. From there on, thanks to micromusic.net and other early Internet communities, things kind of exploded. Suddenly, lots of people who were thinking that this music deserved to be treated as "real music" realized they were not alone, learned how to network and organize shows. It got recognized as a movement of sorts. And from there, it just continued.

In 2009, Johan Kotlinski wrote an article "Amiga Music Programs 1986- 1995" also reflects the author's knowledge of the Commodore 64 and Amiga music programs used by demoscene.

However, similar to Nanoloop, LSDJ borrows some ideas and techniques from demoscene, but its developers are not themselves part of the demo group and its capability may not be in line with the need to create demos. As GOTO80 mentioned, developers in the demoscene usually don't let the music program use all the CPU resources because the demo program needs extra resources to process the graphics, but for chip music developers, their software will use all the available CPU resources to process the music.

@viznut: you are right in many ways. there is a difference in embracing the defaults and trying to transgress them, but chipmusic is usually about both. it's hard to say what's what, when talking intentions. but anyway, i don't think there is a strict general difference between demosceners and 'the others' in that sense. there are plenty of 'naive' chip-uses both by chip- & demosceners. for me, most good chipmusic i find these days are not produced for the demoscene. and to be honest, it's not that often that demoscene chipstuff is technically impressive either. also, the chipsceners have a head start by using CPU-maximizing software when demosceners don't (i mean, LSDj vs Carillon) aswell. (goto80, https://www.pouet.net/topic.php?which=7206&page=5)

Nanoloop and LSDJ are both very popular chip music production tools, and there are many video tutorials online, so I won't go into the details of how to do it in this article.

Why did you choose Game Boy for the chip music scene?

Compared to computer platforms like the Amiga or Commodore 64, the Game Boy was not perfect. The computers had more flexibility, floppy disks could be far more convenient and cheaper to use as writable media than ROM cartridges, the computer's larger screen and keyboard also provided better operational efficiency, and peripherals such as mice and joysticks could also provide more control.

So why did chip musicians outside the demoscene choose the Game Boy as its primary platform in the late 1990s? This question was also asked in "Geeks on Stage? Investigations in the World of (Live) Chipmusic":

But what are the reasons for the enormous popularity the Game Boy has reached as a musical instrument in a very short time? Presumably it is not just the sound. In this respect, other devices, above all, the C64, offer a lot more possibilities. Also emerging tracker software such as LSDj and Nanoloop are probably rather the trigger and not the cause of this development, even though, in this respect, the LSDj especially, with its special live features, opens completely new opportunities.

The article categorizes four reasons for the Game Boy's popularity as an instrument, namely accessibility, mobility and intuitive usability, pop culture symbols, and physical expression of the player. The first two need no introduction; as a handheld game console that has sold over 100 million units, the Game Boy is inexpensive, easy to obtain, and very simple to use. And the latter two are explained in more detail by the author.

Over and above that, however, it seems to be the status of the Game Boy as a popcultural symbol known by everyone in the western world and, for some generations, a part of multi-sensual collective memory, which makes it so attractive. In this connection, Alex Yabsley rightly speaks of the Game Boy as a "symbol with a lot of semiotic meaning already attached to it", which, for this reason, could develop into a trademark for the whole chipmusic scene (Yabsley 2007: 23). A current example is the merchandising package of the RTP DVD, coming with a personalized papercraft Game Boy.

But not just the look, feel, sound and graphics of the Game Boy can evoke and transport such meanings and memories, but also the physical expression of the player, or to quote the media philosopher Vilém Flusser, the gesture of playing the Game Boy can be read (and staged) in different or even contradictory ways. Referring to Umberto Eco, Yabsley coins the term "semiotic guerilla warfare" for the experience someone has visiting a Game Boy concert (Yabsley 2007: 23). On the one hand, you see, with the majority, the stereotyped, rather pity-stirring silhouette of the gamer huddled over a console and immersed in his or her "artificial world". On the other hand, there is the highly-appreciated figure of the artist, the (rock) musician, who, with the exalted movements of his (at best, sweat-covered) body, stands for the authenticity and expressivity of his artistic creativity (Frith 1998: 210-211).

Just as Kraftwerk deconstructed the stereotypical image of rock stars with their suit-clad engineer appearance, so too did the players of Chip Music demonstrate a different kind of human-machine interaction as they held a Game Boy and twisted their bodies around on stage.

Teaching and imitation: wider distribution

In the article "Chipmusic, Fakebit and the Discourse of Authenticity in the Chipscene" it is mentioned that the second generation of chip musicians saw themselves as artists rather than programmers or gamers, while introducing two elements of rapid dissemination for chip music, namely Internet-based distribution and the mobility of performances. Both written tutorials and video materials began to appear on the Internet in the 2000s, while the popularity and ease of mobility of the Game Boy allowed chip music to appear outside of European countries and in street performances.

The paper also mentions that for second-generation musicians, imitation is the first step in learning to make chip music:

The learning process follows a specific pattern: one needs to copy[14] the tutor's steps in order to learn how to manipulate software and then use their own musical ideas.

Copying – or rather, imitating – became an intrinsic characteristic of second generation chipmusicians. Chipsceners who were initially interested in composing chipmusic rather than programming and experimenting on software are found in this generation. Seeing creation as a process of imitation produces an interesting paradox. As Hallam and Ingold (2007, 5) observe, to create a cultural artefact means to produce something new, which did not previously exist. Every creation is bound to a previously existed ideology. If the outcome is new then it is creative according to the initial argument. The logical paradox would suggest that whatever is a copy, or an imitation, cannot be new, and as a result it is not creative. A possible interpretation of this paradox in chipmusic could be seen as follows: To a certain extent, the first chipscene generation instinctively attempt to avoid this paradox from happening by using original platforms and composing chipmusic from scratch. However, it seems that the second generation accepts this paradox (again, instinctively), embracing the concept of imitation as part of the creative process[15].

For myself, I have personally experienced such a process of imitating and then being imitated. FutureSound Vol.2, which I participated in Beijing in the summer of 2019, was a workshop on chip music production, and its main content was modeled after the ChipLabs workshop of the Vancouver Chip Music Society.

Global Music Festival

The second generation of chip musicians mentioned in "Chipmusic, Fakebit and the Discourse of Authenticity in the Chipscene" is also the main group who established many global chip music festivals, and also played a major role in the popularization of chip music to the masses:

Second generation of chipmusicians are most known for establishing global festivals (for example, Blip Festival, Eindbaas, Micromusic parties) and also popularising chipmusic by sampling its aesthetic characteristics in popular culture (using audio samples in popular music, pixelating pictures and so forth). In this chipscene generation, information and communication technologies are adopted as methods of production and promotion. For example, crowdsourcing is a relatively new way of raising funds to support the organisation of events as well as music and video releases in the chipscene, by means of asking for financial support online addressed to Internet users. One such example is the documentary that overviewed the chipscene in Europe entitled Europe in 8 bits, whose director, Javier Polo, begun a crowdsourcing campaign on Verkami[16] raising more than 5,000€.

It should be noted that today's chip music scene is largely defined by the second generation of chip musicians, who redefined the cold and technical definition of the first generation of chip music to make it more compatible with the techno-cultural context.

The practice of creating "fake chip" with emulator software has been emerging since the second generation of chip musicians, and the most important reason for using fake chip is to circumvent the complexity of real hardware, "Chipmusic, Fakebit and the Discourse of Authenticity in the Chipscene" also refers to the tagline written by Canadian software developer Plogue for the fake chip synthesizer ChipSounds.

• You can actually use a standard MIDI controller to start composing chip music.

• You DON'T need to deal with a small and hard to read interface.

• You DON'T need to learn assembly language, or hexadecimal.

• You DON'T have to use a tracker, although it works fine with them as well.

• You can CHOOSE to be limited in terms of pitch and polyphony OR NOT.

• You DON'T need to spend years hunting garage sales, flea markets or online auctions to gather a collection such as this one. We have done it for you :)

Basically, the emergence of the "fake chip" represents a trend towards more simplified chip music creation.

Third generation of chip musicians: more loosely defined

The second generation of chip musicians still follows to a considerable extent the purist approach to hardware of the first generation of chip musicians, including the developers of the "fake chip" software, who also emphasize their true rendition of the hardware's characteristics, as mentioned in the ChipSounds ad.

• We have all those chips and have painstakingly sampled and analyzed them ourselves.

• We've revisited all known documentation of each chip and verified any technical allegations using our own custom tests on them.

However, the biggest difference between the third generation of chip musicians and the second generation is that the former is not concerned with technical limitations and purist standards, but rather combine acoustic instruments as well as computer hardware and software. They are often sometimes referred to as chipsters, or chip hipsters. Their use of chip music is more akin to "vintage clothes" and is motivated more by the expression of culturally anti-mainstream ideas than by technical preferences or achievements.

"Fakebit" and the gaming community

"Chipmusic, Fakebit and the Discourse of Authenticity in the Chipscene" also mentions that many fans of "fakebit" come from the gaming community.

During fieldwork, Roger Cruz, who runs Chip-Con International stressed that most people that become interested in fakebit come from video game communities such as OCRemix (interview, 2013).

Me: Is OCRemix retro-oriented?

Roger: Yeah, but it's just old soundtracks made into more modern music. That's not what chiptune is about, but we are getting a ton of people from that community, thanks to Chiptunes=Win and DJ Cutman, who came from there. As long as there's some chiptune involved, it's considered chiptune – doesn't matter if it's fake or not, the audience doesn't care either, but there's a preference for pure chip a lot more than mixed stuff. (E-mail interview, 2013.)

To a certain extent, this also explains the confusion in the understanding of chip music in China today: that is, most "chip music" fans are actually retro game music fans, and when Sulimi and other first domestic chip musicians started to spread chip music in China around 2010, it was already the time of the second to third generation of chip musicians overseas, when retro games like "VVVVVVV" became popular, and also when a large number of nostalgic game fans flocked to the topic of chip music on the Internet. The concept of "chip music" has been associated with games almost from the very beginning. And apart from myself, there is hardly anyone else in China who understands the connection between chip music and the demoscene.

The stagnation and revival of chip music in Japan

In China, the 8-bit computers with PSG widely used in Europe were almost never popular, and almost everyone's exposure to chip music was through Japanese game consoles or more specifically Famicom and its clones (Famiclone). As a result, there is often a misconception in China that chip music is part of Japanese culture. But as described in the previous three lessons, when the game industry abandoned the use of chip music, almost all of the development around sound chips was done by Europeans throughout the 1990s, and chip music in Japan was almost at a standstill.

In 2001 summary article, Japanese chip music researcher and VORC.org webmaster Haruhisa Tanaka (hally) described his impressions of American composer Jake Kaufman's (Virt) album in the following way.

("FX EP")Not only the composition is excellent, but he succeed to imitate old Konami style completely. Maybe it isn't possible for today's Japanese musicians, including Konami. Virt can be the only successor to Konami of those days. This means Japanese chiptune style is dead in Japan, but appreciated in USA/Europe. So "FX EP" became a turning point of Japanese chiptune.

And Japanese demoscene and chip music researcher, SID Media Lab station webmaster Takashi Kawano (akaobi) mentioned that in the 90s Japanese Trackers were used to make BMS files for music game BM98, and "MOD" was once mistaken as a synonym for game files. He also mentions that VORC was the first website to introduce the term "chip music" to Japan.

Once, my junior asked me, "Have you ever heard MOD?" I had no idea what the term meant, and later knew that it referred to a music file format used in Urao Yane’s BM98 released in 1998, which was a freeware inspired from beatmania released by Konami in 1997. To be exact, the format is a script called BMS (Be-Music Script or Be-Music Source file) in which assignment of objects made of wav files and bmp files is described, so it is quite different from MOD as a music file format. In the BMS scene, the work of making a file has been divided into pictures and sounds. This is similar to division of making a product in the demoscene. In other words, there is a concept of profession there. Moreover, in Japan in the late 1990s, tools originate from the demoscene such as Scream Tracker, Impulse Tracker, FastTracker II, MODPlug Tracker, and PlayerPRO were used for making music in the BMS scene, as well as by other PC users. The demoscene was located right by me. And then in 2001, chipmusic site VORC launched, which introduced the term and the concept of chiptune to this country. Ironically, I did not own my PC in the same year.

The year 2002 is considered by hally to be "the real beginning of chip music in Japan", and much of that revolved around LSDJ.

Till last year, non-commercial chip music in Japan was almost dead. But since nanoloop started Japanese language support, new chiptune generation finally appeared also from Japan. cow'p (19-t) is one of the most successful Gameboy musician in Japan. His debut album "Africa" bursts hardcore chippie idm. mmfan316 is one of the earliest nanoloop musician in Japan who will soon debut from USA. K-> is one of the most recent Little Sound Dj user, but brings quite refreshed Konamic pops. W2X is an unknown robotic chip composer who uses GBC or MSX. Hex125 is impressive about super tricky funky style. He's now directing Little Sound Dj Japanese support page. Btw. Little Sound Dj added some excellent features such as LSDj Patcher which allows you to change sample kits, and KeyboardInterface to play Gameboy via PC keyborard.

In addition, hally also mentioned that the tools available for the Famicom around 2002 and the NSF music format promoted the connection between the Japanese and Western music communities. On the one hand, the Famicom MML music compiler mck was accepted by the chip music community outside of Japan at the end of 2001. On the other hand, NerdTracker2, cheestracker and other music editing software that can edit NSF files also entered Japan, bringing many new inspirations to local enthusiasts.

As with hardware/software development, cultural revolution caused by mck is also worth to mention. Some non-Japanese composers such as Virt, Rugar and Nulsleep started to use mck. You know, graphical tracker style has been the standard method to compose game/demo tunes for European/American people. So Japanese simple (for better or for worse) text based style called MML has been out of understanding. At least most of people weren't motivated to enter with this way. But mck started melting such an ice wall.

So Virt translated mckc manual to English. It's the first MML guide written by non-Japanese. And nullsleep also explained how to use DPCM for mck. Then Rugar released "My Girl, The Princess LP", the first MML music album compiled by non-Japanese. NES - the common background between two chip music culture - met the internet which makes us forget the national border. Those factors caused such unheard-of collaboration.

On the other hand, other music editors to make NSF files such as NerdTracker2 (for DOS/Windows, Dec.) and cheestracker (for Linux, Jan.) were brought. Now you can select your favorite ways. Hope this revolution will cause a little change to Japanese ossified chip musicians who isn't motivated to compose their original music yet.

Why is there no demoscene in Japan?

It's not hard to understand why Japanese chip music has stagnated. Japan doesn't have an equivalent to the demoscene to inherit and develop chip music production techniques. So why there is no demoscene in Japan? Japanese game developer, Koichi Yoshida (yosshin4004), the author of Cho Ren Sha 68K, summarized it in more detail in "Situation in Japan before the outbreak of the demoscene" (デモシーン発生前の日本の狀況), where he argued that the reasons for the lack of a demoscene in Japan were as follows:

• In Japan, video game consoles have become more popular, which has reduced the exposure of Japanese youth to graphics programming

• The pattern of software cracking activities in Japan is different from that of overseas, as cracking activities in Japan are more hidden and no one makes cracking credits to reveal their identity as crackers, which is obviously different from the situation of cracking openly especially compared to Eastern Europe where it is difficult to obtain genuine software.

• Japan lacks a "computer underground" similar to western countries. Japan has computers and arts, but lacks an underground atmosphere to link them.

• Japan's thriving anime culture has "co-opted" individual fans through its strong infrastructure, and the Comiket (comic market) and the Pasoket (means "personal computer market", which is a doujinshi computer software marketplace) have made the majority of developers inclined to make games by the role of the market. The PROJECT TEAM DoGA has diverted non-real-time animation and CG works.

• Japan lacks a base of computer game parties similar to LAN Party overseas

From this we can also see that cultural factors are playing a stronger role in the emergence of demoscene than technical conditions. This is particularly important to consider in our future research into the applicability or inapplicability of certain products, technologies and communities in particular countries.

Wrap-up

In the past three lessons, we have reviewed the developmental origins of chip music, especially the differences between chip music and game music and the connections to the demoscene, we hope that this lesson will help you understand and observe the interactions and images between different technological subcultures.