Sean Leo – Looking Outwards – 04

Chiptune music, or chip music, is produced mostly using video game consoles and home computer technology. Musicians utilize the sound card found on those devices and generate patterns to create their music. Most notably are musicians using the Nintendo Gameboy to create their sounds with. What I find so interesting about chiptune is that there’s an aspect of nostalgia, as we all have been accustomed to 8-bit plings and beeps growing up in an age of fast media advancements. Now the sounds feel old, and out-dated. Which, honestly, is apart of it’s appeal to me. It is choice to not use the newest, highest fidelity systems, and instead use a consumer product from an entirely different industry. Part of the rise of chiptune was it’s accessibility. If you had a game boy you were already half way there. The music from those games are iconic (we could probably all whistle the Mario theme, whenever asked), so to have those same sounds be created in a live setting with the energy of a punk show; it’s incredibly fun.