Games - Chiptune

	Games - Chiptune

Chiptune, or chip music is music written in sound formats where all the sounds are synthesized in realtime by a computer or video game console sound chip, instead of using sample-based synthesis. The "golden age" of chiptunes was the mid 1980s to early 1990s, when such sound chips were the only widely available means for creating music on computers. The medium gave composers great flexibility in creating their own "instrument" sounds, but because early computer sound chips had only simple tone generators and noise generators, it also imposed limitations on the complexity of the sound; chiptunes sometimes seem "harsh" or "squeaky" to the unaccustomed listener. Chiptunes are closely related to video game music. The term is nowadays also used to denote music that uses these distinctly-sounding synthesizer intruments for their artistic value rather than due to hardware limitations.

Technology

Historically, the "chips" used were sound chips like the analog-digital hybrid Atari POKEY on the Atari 400/800, the MOS Technology SID on the Commodore 64, the Yamaha YM2149 on the Atari ST, AY-3-8910 on MSX and ZX Spectrum, the Yamaha YM3812 on IBM PC compatibles, and the Ricoh 2A03 on the Nintendo Entertainment System or Famicom. For the MSX several sound upgrades, such as the Konami SCC, the Yamaha YM2413 (MSX-MUSIC) and Yamaha Y8950 (MSX-AUDIO, predecessor of the OPL3) and the OPL4-based Moonsound were released as well, each having its own characteristic chiptune sound.

The technique of chiptunes with samples synthesized at runtime continued to be popular even on machines with full sample playback capability; because the description of an instrument takes much less space than a raw sample, these formats created very small files, and because the parameters of synthesis could be varied over the course of a composition, they could contain deeper musical expression than a purely sample-based format. Also, even with purely sample-based formats, such as the MOD format, chip sounds created by looping very small samples still could take up much less space.

These sample-based chiptunes were often used in crack intros, since they had to be squeezed into any spare space available on the disk of the cracked software.

As newer computers stopped using dedicated synthesis chips and began to primarily use sample-based synthesis, more realistic timbres could be recreated, but often at the expense of file size (as with MODs) and potentially without the personality imbued by the limitations of the older sound chips.

The standard MIDI file format, together with the General MIDI instrument set, describes only what notes are played on what instruments. General MIDI is not considered chiptune as a MIDI file contains no information describing the synthesis of the instruments.

Many common file formats used to compose and play chiptunes are the SID, MOD, and several Adlib based file formats.

Style

Generally chip tunes consist of basic waveforms, such as sine waves, square waves and sawtooth or triangle waves, and basic percussion, often generated from white noise going through an ADSR envelope controlled synthesizer.

Crack intros and demo scene intros came to feature their own particular style of chiptune music. Although chiptune could historically refer to any style of music, the term is mostly used today to refer to the style of music used in these intros, since other styles of music have moved on to more sophisticated technology.

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