Over the years, synthesizers that now emulate the same type of sound from yesteryear emerged, although there are chiptune artists who prefer to continue using Gameboys or old gaming consoles to compose, and even to play live. In some way, chiptune music is born thanks to this movement, where curious people hacked video games to break the barriers of the software.Īmong the discovered functionalities, there was the possibility of altering the functioning of the sound chips and taking control of them to use them as audio synthesizers, which allowed to use them to create their own melodies. The world is full of curious people who want to know how an electronic device works, how to hack it to get new functionalities or just for fun.

How did chiptune emerge as a retro musical genre? The reality is, due to the fame of many games in the past, chiptune music is currently considered a musical genre, is a cultural movement that goes beyond the technology used at that time to create video game music. It must be borne in mind that nowadays the amount of bits in an audio file is not the only thing that indicates its sound quality. It is called like that because the game consoles of that time were “8-bit consoles”. However, all of the above doesn’t have much to do with what we know as “8-bit music”. To get an idea, today it is normal to work at 16 bits, which are 65536 amplitude levels, and even at 24 bits, which is more than enough to make the recording of a musical instrument to sound as the reality, and create a digital representation quite true to the original.

The greater the number of bits, the greater the amount of information in an audio file.

And the complex part, we say that digital music is stored in bits, and bits represent the capacity of a digital receiver to recognize and transform analog waves of musical instruments into digital information. Simply put, we could say that it is music that is played on sound chips of old gaming consoles, such as NES, Atari, Game Boy, etc. What is chiptune, chip music or 8-bit music?

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