The ambient gurus at disquiet snagged a copy of Tristan Perich’s 1-Bit Symphony, a unique piece of audio art:

1-Bit Symphony isn’t a CD; it’s a small homebrew electronic device nestled inside a CD case. It is, in that way, a kind of parallel to the Buddha Machine (and the forthcoming Gristleism). The 1-Bit Symphony is to the compact disc what the Buddha and Gristleism boxes are to transistor radios. They’re lo-fi music-producing technology packed inside the familiar form of a pretty much outdated music-producing technology.

When the switch seen second from the left inside the box is flipped to its right, the machine starts emitting lo-fi sound (it’s necessary to attach headphones to the audio jack to hear the music). There are five “tracks” in all, “movements” they’re titled here. The first four are between five and 10 minutes in length. The fifth will play forever, or at least until that replaceable battery dies. In brief, the music is a series of cascading little beeps that suggest Philip Glass as a character in a Mario Bros. video game.

Earlier in the year, Moldover released his CD in a theremin CD case.

More at disquiet.

Cool Hunting interviews Bitshifter about making music with Gameboys.

via coolhunting:

In our third installment of the 8-Bit series, we interview Bitshifter (Joshua Davis) about creating music with a pair of Gameboys. The interview takes place at ‘Barcade’ in Brooklyn and also features Mike Rosenthal, Experimental Music Director at ‘The Tank.’

The festival showcases the use of the former heavyweights of computing such as the Commodore 64 and Amiga, the Atari ST and 2600, and the Nintendo Entertainment System and Game Boy to create arresting music and visual art.

Artists announced so far include:

• Bit Shifter
• Chromix
• Disasterpeace
• failotron
• Fighter X
• I, Cactus
• Je Deviens DJ En Trois Jours
• Leeni
• little-scale
• Nullsleep
• Rainbowdragoneyes
• The Hunters
• The J. Arthur Keenes Band

via truechiptildeath

NSFW?

La Film Fabrique
Playboy’s Bend
Mefamo et le collectif Physalis

présentent
Production/ Jonas Luyckx
Réalisation et cadre/ Jonas Luyckx
Avec/ Caroline Dehareng
Amandine Bevalot
Marie Airo
Alice Piette
Emilie Hermans
pour le collectif Physalis
Estelle Bibbo
Ornella Vernica
Melody Willams

Montage/ John Pirard
DOP/ Shaban Krasniqi

Avec le soutien de Oxfam solidarité et de Jules Gazon

Saltone peforms the Michael Jackson Thriller 8bit tribute mix. 

via JapanPost24:

Michael Jackson Thriller 8bit Chiptune tribute Remix Live at Exp2.

(tokyo Japan)

http://www.myspace.com/saitone

Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite! by Burnkit2600k comes from the new 8-Bit Operators 2009 Beatles tribute compilation Wanna Hld Yr Handheld.

via burnkit2600:

Burnkit2600 pay homage to one of their most influential bands with a psychedigital cover of The Beatles’ song, ‘Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!’ – one of John Lennon’s most playfully visual songs, and one of the group’s (and of course George Martin’s) most experimental productions.This song was created expressly for the  (8bitoperators.com/beatles/)

The video was made with archival footage supplied by the Internet Moving Images Archive in association with Prelinger Archives.

Last week, we brought you the news of Plogue’s new 8-bit style software synth, Chipsounds.

According to Plogue, Chipsounds emulates more than eight vintage 8bit-era sound chips (on top of their variants), down to their smallest idiosyncrasies.

Now you can decide for yourself:

chipsounds EP by chipsounds

These tracks were made by the chipsounds beta team and show the
variety of styles and sounds that can be achieved with the software.

The only guideline given was that the music’s chip content had to be made using chipsounds.

Check out the demos and let me know what you think!

Yeah, yeah – here’s that “talking piano” video that’s been bouncing around the Internet for a week.

I didn’t feature it here, because I thought Conlon Nancarrow was doing a lot more interesting things, and more musical things, with player piano sequencing back in the 1940s.

And, if you’re going to make a talking instrument, in my book – it’s either got to make music, or it’s got to say “Exterminate!”

But others are obviously seeing potential in this. Or that je ne sais quoi that makes an Internet meme.

Anyway, this video captures a”speaking piano” reciting the Proclamation of the European Environmental Criminal Court at World Venice Forum 2009.

Composer Peter Ablinger basically pixelated sound, at a resolution appropriate to the range of the piano, and used the pixelations as “notes” to sequence and reproduce a lo-fi version of the original sound.

UPDATE: Astera on hackaday wrote a rough translation:

Pretty amazing, how all of a sudden the words of the Declaration become understandable to a European Environmental Criminal Court. Wien Modern was one out of ten cultural institutions asked for an artistic contribution to the event in Palazzo Ducale in Venice. The ambitious goal was to make this message audible with musical means, without falling back to a simple setting.

Berno Polzer: I think, its partially understandable, partially not. And it plays well with the limits of our construction abilities. That is, we hear sounds that obviously arent normal Music, but neither they are language, and one could say that sometimes, a bridging happens. Personally, I think you can understand individual words even without knowing the text, and the Eureka moment happens when you see the text, and suddenly, the language is there.

Yet another bridge: Miro Markus, an elementary school student from Berlin, narrated the text for the performance: Youth as a hope for the older generation.

The Austrian composer Peter Ablinger transferred the frequency spectrum of the childs voice to his computer controlled mechanical piano.

Peter Ablinger: I break down this phonography, meaning a recording of something the voice, in this case -, in individual pixels, one can say. And if I have the possibility of a rendering in a fairly high resolution (and that I only get with a mechanical piano), then I in fact restore some kind of continuity. Therefore, with a little practice, or help or subtitling, we actually can hear a human voice in a piano sound.

Plogue has announced a new soft-synthesizer, Chipsounds, that turns your VST/AU/RTAS host into a classic video game console, vintage 8-bit home computer and even an 80’s arcade.

Plogue Chipsounds authentically emulates more than eight vintage 8-bit era sound chips (on top of their variants). But more interestingly, it also faithfully allows you to dynamically reproduce the accidentally discovered sounds effect tricks and abusive musical techniques that were made famous by innovative chiptune composers and classic video game sound designers, which for the good part of the last 2 decades, have pushed beyond the boundaries of the original chip designs.

No pricing or release date have been announced. Details and audio demos are available at the Plogue site.

The Meatscience Bitsmacker is described as a “digital distortion swiss army knife” for adding that certain digital crustiness to your pristine audio signal. It can simulate vintage samplers, and classic video game systems.

Features:

• Zero-latency
• Sample rate reduction from 50 to 44100 hz
• Bit depth range from 0.01 to 32 bit
• Parametric EQ on Input
• Parametric EQ on Output
• Drive adjustment for boost
• All values continuously variable, no large steps between values
• Works in any Audio Unit host (Garage Band, Logic, Ableton, etc etc)
• A swift kick in the trousers

Despite its popularity, though, the music of C64 games has rarely been analysed in academic articles.
Karen Collins’ Loops And Bloops: Music of the Commodore 64 Games discusses the technical constraints of C64’s SID soundchip and how this shaped the musical aesthetic of music on the Commodore 64:

Technological constraints are nothing new to musical composition, although most discussions arising about the subject have centered on twentieth century concerns.

Mark Katz discusses how the 78 RPM record led to a standard time limit for pop songs, and how Stravinsky famously tailor-made Sérénade en LA for the length of an LP; although he points out, however, that Stravinsky may have been shaped by “his penchant for self-imposed limitations” (Katz, 2004: 3-5).

Critiques of “hard” technological determinism as it relates to musical technologies have dominated the discussion (e.g. Taylor, 1993: 27; Théberge, 1997: 160; Katz, 2004), in favour of a softer approach in which the relationship is more of a negotiation. As with other recent approaches to music technology, I would argue that the relationship between technology and aesthetics is one of symbiosis rather than dominance, what Barry Salt (1985: 37) refers to as a “loose pressure on what is done, rather than a rigid constraint.”

Micromusicians tend to agree, and embrace the constraints as an important part of the creative process, as Teamtendo intimates: “Working with this limited harmonic vocabulary forces you to be creative, and there are some very pleasant discoveries along the way,” or, says Goto80, “it’s fun working with such hardcore limits, forcing you to realize your ideas in other ways.”

In order to explore the constraints of the C64 on composition, I first discuss the limitations of the sound chip, showing the conventional ways in which the chip was used. I follow this with a comparison of well-known, pre-composed songs which were covered on the C64 in various games. I then explore approaches to interactivity and looping in Commodore games music, drawing comparisons between the C64 and its contemporaries.

Full article here.

Let’s get this out of the way up front: The answer is – because it was there.

This video demonstrates an iPod with TouchOSC controlling a vintage Commodore 64 synthesizer (SID Chip), with a home made C64 MIDI interface.

Hacktacular.

Littlescale, we salute you.

This is a demonstration of some of the sounds and features of the DAED Feedback Synthesizer.

via legionhwp:

It is not a song but rather a walk through of this little simple noise box with a powerful array of sounds. Handheld buzzes, drones, chirps, rumbles galore.These are now available for sale on a very limited basis. Please visit Helpwantedproductions.com/Salez/FS.htm for this and other synths and circuit bent electronic instruments and effects.

If you’ve been waiting a long time for that 8-bit cover of Smack My Bitch Up, your wait is over.

Russian chiptune artists got their lo fi on and put together three (3) – count ‘em – The Prodigy tribute albums.

The album site is sort of inpenetrable (when it’s not in Russian) so look:

• here
• here, and
• here

You can preview $ele?’s Smack My Bitch Up below.

8-bit Trip is an homage to classic video games – featuring a bouncy chip music soundtrack and 8-bit graphics visualized with stop-motion Lego animation. Music by Daniel Larrson.

via rymdreglage:

1500 hours of moving lego bricks and take photos of them.

This is the teaser video for Kind of Bloop, an 8-bit tribute to Miles Davis’s classic jazz album Kind of Blue, released on the 50th anniversary of the album on August 17, 2009.

Music by chiptune artists ast0r, Virt, Sergeeo, Shnabubula, and Disasterpeace.

I was prepared to hate this album – but after listening to the previews at the album site, I’ve got to admit, it kind of swings.

Digital downloads will be available starting August 20th at the KindOfBloop site.

About the project:

What would the pioneers of jazz sound like on a Nintendo Entertainment System? Coltrane on a C-64? Mingus on Amiga? For years, I’ve wondered what “chiptune jazz” would sound like, but there are only a tiny handful of jazz covers ever made.

To satisfy my curiosity — and commemorate the 50th anniversary of Miles Davis’s “Kind of Blue” — I’ve asked five brilliant chiptune musicians to collaborate and reinvent the entire album in the 8-bit sound.

The lineup, in alphabetical order:
Ast0r (Chris J. Hampton)
Disasterpeace (Rich Vreeland)
Sergeeo (Sergio de Prado)
Shnabubula (Samuel Ascher-Weiss)
Virt (Jake Kaufman)

A bunch of people travel to the moon and toss a rave, and then bend space time.

Music video for the track Dirty ROM Dance Mix by Nullsleep, Jeremiah Johnson. Containing glitch textures by “noteNdo” Jeff Donaldson.

Animation by “plasticflesh” Stieg Retlin. 2009.

SJD – “Baby You’re Oh So”

Produced, directed and ASCIIized by Dom & Simon Taylor. From the album ‘Dayglo Spectres’ on Round Trip Mars.

via sjimflav, MOS

The world of music lost one of its most iconic stars today, Michael Jackson.

It’s a cliche, but Jackson lives on in his music, not just in its original form but in thousands of permutations.

The world of 8-bit Michael Jackson covers, is a little strange, or maybe a lot strange, depending on your perspective. But, even in video game style arrangements, Jackson’s best songs are still insanely catchy.

Here are just a few examples…….

Billie Jean C64 Edition 8-bit

Click here to view the embedded video.

8-bit Beat It

Click here to view the embedded video.

Thriller – 8bit Cover by Superpowerless

Click here to view the embedded video.

Note: This post has been updated to focus on Jackson’s music. People universally hated the original post.

This is a two guys, one synth demo of what could be the ultimate Commodore 64 synthesizer, a C64 customized to work with Cynthcart.

via kilobyte242:

fully customized Commodore 64, enhanced for Cynthcart. Features SID2SID installation, Linear/Slider pot for Cynthcart filter, active guitar effects (overdrive and frequency filter) for each SID’s output, an mounted musical overlay, feedback knobs…..for more information check out www.kilobytemodshop.com