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The term chiptune or chip music refers to music written in module 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.
Historically, the "chips" used were audio co-processors 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 and ZX Spectrum, and the Yamaha YM3812 on IBM PC compatibles.
In those days, memory and storage space were limited and valuable, driving some composers to create very small modules. As little data as possible was used to create a sound; for example, repeatedly looping 64 bytes of data to produce a constant tone. These were mostly used in crack intros, which had to be squeezed into any spare space on the disk of the cracked software.
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.
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. Whether or not a MIDI file counts as a chiptune is debatable, but in any case MIDI is not generally used for "chiptune-style" music.
Generally chip tunes consist of basic waveforms, such as sine waves, square waves and sawtooth waves, and basic percussion, often generated from white noise going through an ADSR 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.
More recent "oldschool"/"oldsk00l" or "demostyle" MOD music, although sample-based, continues the style of the chiptunes used in these intros; new compositions in this style can still be regularly found in places such as the .
Modern PCs running emulators can now play the music written for old computer systems with a fair degree of accuracy; because chiptune files are so small, exhaustive compilations of old chiptune music are widely available on the Internet. Finally, some new artists continue to explore the challenges and possibilities of writing music within the old chiptune framework.
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Big beat | Bitpop | Chip | Downtempo | Glitch | IDM | Nu jazz | Post-rock | Trip hop |
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