Blip Festival: The 8-Bit Music Mix-Off

Credit: flickr / The Year of the Mud

This weekend (May 25?27), Popular Mechanics is heading to the Blip Festival, one of the biggest chiptune shows in the United States. If you?re scratching your head wondering what the heck a chiptune is, imagine the sounds of 1980s video-game systems such as Atari or Nintendo. At the Blip Festival, artists use those bleeps and bloops to make music. Here?s what to know about this geek-fest.

People onstage will be fiddling with Game Boys and swapping cartridges in and out. But they?re not playing Tetris or The Legend of Zelda. These cartridges contain software made to play music. Each one has its own customized library of sounds, and it?s up to the chiptune musician to stitch them together into a song.

Those musicians also bristle at the contention that they?re making ?video-game music.? Yes, they?re using the old systems, but they are not rehashing the Super Mario Bros. underwater theme?they?re mixing old sounds into complex and sonically rich songs. And chiptunes is not a single genre of music?think of it more as an instrument. Some of the musicians specialize in poppy dance numbers, while others opt for something like droning noise-rock. Other instruments, such as guitar, drums, and the occasional woodwind, will hit the stage to back the blips and bloops.

Chiptune songs are never exactly the same, either. Although it may seem like all musicians need to do is push play and walk away, there are elements of improvisation to a performance. If the audience goes crazy for a particular riff, the creator can cue it up again in the sequencer and milk it for all it?s worth. If the venue?s acoustics make the bass line sound a little wimpy, they can tinker around with the waveform, adjusting it until they get that visceral thump.

Once you move beyond the nostalgia factor, chiptunes become a big auditory experiment. When musicians start a new project, it rarely sounds exactly as they imagine. But then they fall in love with those unexpected sounds and find a way to incorporate them into the song.

Here are a few samples:

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