Bleep Bloop

You may not have fond memories of the DMG-01, otherwise known as the Nintendo Game Boy, but I do. That grey plastic box with its red buttons and sickly green screen that couldn’t be seen easily either in direct sunlight or in the dark was at the top of my Christmas list every year. At school, I leaned over the shoulder of my friend (conveniently also named Andrew) to see him play Zelda: Link’s Awakening next to the portables during recess in the 5th grade. He would constantly be frustrated that I was “in his light.”

I eventually just bought one for myself in 1998, after it was already outdated. I got it just in time, before my family drove the 2200 miles to move from Edmonton, Canada to Cleveland, Ohio. It defeated the monotony of the endless stretches of plains as you drive East through North Dakota. I played it then, and I played it on almost all of the subsequent trips back to Edmonton. The number of hours I spent obsessively moving little blocks into rows in Tetris has almost definitely has given me some sort of neurotic complex.

So, to hear that there were people using these little obsolete gaming machines to make music blew my mind. I got the required software and had to start making music myself.

At first, the love of chiptunes was nostalgia. But in was more than nostalgia. When you have spent so many hours of your life listening to a certain set of tones and chimes, they become almost like a native musical language. I imagine it would be the same as if someone grew up next to a cathedral and heard the bells ring every day, and then they discovered a way to easily compose music for those same bells. I suddenly could use the auditory language of some incredibly enjoyable moments in my life to write poetry. I could express myself using the noises that I heard in victory and defeat, ones that I heard when celebrating with friends over new records or game completion. The instruments were the very instruments I heard when aligning blocks in Tetris, when watching Link explore dungeons.

Creatively, there are real challenges with writing music on a 28 year old hand held computer made to play Mario Brothers. There are only 4 audio channels: only four potential voices at once. Those channels have a narrow spectrum of sound options. But every limitation presented itself like an opportunity. What can I create with a voice that can only generates static white noise? I relied heavily on the work others had done, borrowing their ideas, and then trying to tinker on my own. It became like painting with only primary colours – as soon as you learn how to mix them and play with them a whole new world of possibilities emerge. The possibilities seem endless when you hear the kind of magic that someone like Bit Shifter does with only a Game Boy or two.

So you may not hear chiptunes music with the same love that I do. You may find my interpretation of an Anglican service as performed by a Game Boy as at best childish, or at worst blasphemous. And it may be that in 20 years the 8 bit sounds of the Game Boy are no longer music to anyone’s ears. But for many in a generation of people who grew up hearing these sounds, this is what beautiful music sounds like.