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This week, we're talking about the who, what, and why of Chiptunes! A few parts music theory, a few parts video games, and a lot of speculation!
Next week, Nier, far, wherever you are, we know that your heart will be... drifting out in space, ready to take down aliens? We'll be talking about the Nier series!
## Episode outline
### Fandom Facts
**History and Origins:**
Chiptune (also known as chip music or 8-bit music) is a style of synthesized electronic music which is made for a programmable sound generator (PSG) though the term is also often used for music made in the _tracker_ format, which is intended to sound like PSG-created music. This music is often composed from 'simple' wave forms such as pulse waves, square waves, triangle waves, and sawtooth waves.
Although real-time synthesized has been possible since as early as 1951, it wasn't until the golden age of video arcade games (late 70s and early 80s) that chiptune music began to appear in video games (and by extension, reach the masses). Of particular note, artists such as Yello Magic Orchestra had started sampling video game music in the late 70s which had a major influence on music that would later come in the 8- and 16-bit eras.
Various advances in computing, such as frequency modulation synthesis (FM synthesis), MIDI, and sample-based sound synthesis furthered chiptune music up until the end of the 1980s where chiptune music declined in popularity until a resurgence in interest in the mid-2000s with mainstream music leveraging the artform again (for example, _Girl_ by Beck, or _On Top_ by the Killers).
We could likely have a whole episode on the history of chiptunes...
**Search Data:**
Interest in Chiptune is probably [about the same as the oldest data we have from 2004](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F0lc1r). As mentioned in the history, the mid-2000s did see an increase in chiptune music, from 2004 until the height of interest in August 2010 (possibly related to Kesha's best-selling single of 2010, _Tik Tok_). Since then, interest has been on a slow decline to 2004 levels.
The top 10 countries, by search volume, are as follows: Sweeden, Norway, Finland, Netherlands, Canada, Australia, Denmark, United States, United Kingdom, Japan.
**Size of Fandom:**
Based on a few data points...
- The [chiptune subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/chiptunes/) has over 22 000 subscribers
- [Anamanaguchi released their album _Endless Fantasy_ (and then some) on Kickstarter](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dreamhax/anamanaguchi-make-endless-fantasy-more-than-album) with over 7000 backers and over $250 000 USD
- DJ Cutman has [almost 9000 followers on Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/DjCUTMAN/)
- Ben Briggs has [over 12 000 subscribers on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRC_MIZGejtGSsM8AE6GNwQ)
It's safe to say that there are probably *tens of thousands of fans of chiptunes*.
**Fan terms:**
There are some terms that are not exactly fan terms, but more generally musical / technical terms:
- _Sample_: a digital sound file of an instrument, voice, or sound effect
- _Note_: the frequency a sample is played at, like an instrument (e.g. _C_, _C#_, _G_)
- _Track / Channel_: a space where a sample is played back at a time. Some hardware limits the number of channels available, and modern trackers often have an unlimited number of channels.
- _Pattern_: a group of tracks that represents a full section of a song
- _Order_: part of a sequence of patterns that defines the layout of a song
- _Fakebit_: Poorly defined, but often referring to music that is written that is possible to be performed on a particular sound chip, but may have been written on modern hardware
- _Riptunes_: A more extreme version of Fakebit; music that uses chiptune sounds without regard to whether or not the piece could be played on a particular sound chip
**Fana...
