chiptune

A genre of constrained [electronic music] technologically, compositionally and/or aesthetically (depending on who you ask) informed and inspired by the simple but suggestive sounds and sound-generating hardware found in early [video arcade] machines (notably ones by Namco, Konami and Sega), [Yamaha] digital [frequency modulation (FM) synthesis] boards for early Japanese personal computers (later introduced to the west by the [AdLib] in 1987 and the Sound Blaster in 1989) and waveform generators generally, allowing limited numbers of channels (characteristically worked around through arpeggiation) to evoke instrumentation and percussion through triggering combinations of pulse waves, square waves, triangle waves and sawtooth waves.

As the soundtracks of actual video games left chip soundtracks behind once CD media finally allowed sufficient room for fully digitized audio recorded by rock bands and symphony orchestras and they stopped being bundled with games as a matter of necessity, nostalgia for the bleeps and bloops emerged around the turn of the century, and a broad community of chiptune enthusiasts emerged to compose for and attend concerts featuring performances of chiptunes made using [LSDJ] on [Game Boy] hardware. (The [Vancouver Chipmusic Society] served up many juicy helpings of these performances to area code 604, but the Covid-19 pandemic took the wind out of their sails and they never filled back up again.)

Is music sequenced for the [C64]'s sophisticated [SID] chip chiptune? Most people would, I suspect, say yes. How about [MIDI]? I don't know if you will reach consensus there. Sample-based [tracker music]? It's close enough for many, but definitely not all. Somewhere in that grey area you find a large corpus of "[keygen]" soundtracks to turn-of-the-century [cracktro]s, and despite many of them being more tracky than chippy, I understand they are largely considered to fall within the chiptune genre. [Dot matrix printer] / [Floppotron] / [Mario Paint Composer] / single-channel [MML] BASIC music? Not all computer or video game music (VGM) is widely considered chiptune, and I expect that these would be excluded from the club.