Chiptune

Chiptune — also called chip music or 8-bit music — is electronic music made with the sound chips of vintage computers, consoles and arcade machines, or with software that faithfully imitates them: a handful of channels of square and pulse waves, a triangle or simple waveform for bass, a noise channel for drums, and very fast arpeggios that fake chords the hardware cannot play. It grew out of 1980s game and home-computer sound, was kept alive by the demoscene, and since the late 1990s has been a scene of its own, played live on Game Boys and NES consoles.

Chiptune is a sound and a set of tools; video game music is a function. Much early game music is chiptune, but modern game scores are mostly orchestral or produced like any other record, and most chiptune today is made for clubs and albums, not games. This guide covers the hardware, the history, the techniques and the artists. To hear how a square-wave track reads to a classifier, try a clip in our free AI music genre detector.

Chiptune is defined by timbre more than by style. Any melody can be arranged as chiptune; what makes it chiptune is that every sound is produced by a programmable sound generator — a chip with a small number of oscillators producing simple geometric waveforms — rather than by sampled instruments or a modern synthesizer with unlimited voices. The constraint is the point. A composer writing for the Nintendo Entertainment System has two pulse channels, one triangle channel, one noise channel and a low-quality sample channel, and everything — melody, harmony, bass and drums — has to fit.

The result has a recognisable sound: bright, buzzy pulse-wave leads whose tone changes with the duty cycle; a soft, slightly stepped triangle bass; drums made from bursts of white noise; and arpeggios cycling through the notes of a chord so quickly that the ear hears a shimmering chord. Pitch bends, vibrato and volume envelopes are all programmed by hand, step by step, usually in a tracker.

The term covers several things: the original music written for 8-bit and early 16-bit machines; the demoscene's music for home computers; and the modern scene that uses old hardware — or emulations of it — to make pop, dance music, punk and metal. When chip sounds are blended with guitars, live drums or modern production, the result is often called bitpop.

The sound began in the arcades. Space Invaders (Taito, 1978) looped four descending bass notes that sped up as the aliens came closer; Namco's Rally-X (1980) is credited with the first continuous melodic background music; Pac-Man's 1980 intro tune by Toshio Kai became one of the most recognised pieces of electronic music in the world. In 1984 Haruomi Hosono of Yellow Magic Orchestra — a band that had itself sampled arcade sounds — released Video Game Music, an album built from Namco arcade audio and an early example of game sound treated as a record in its own right.

The home machines of the 1980s each had a voice. The Commodore 64 (1982) carried the MOS Technology SID, designed by Bob Yannes: three oscillators, each switchable between pulse, sawtooth, triangle and noise, plus ring modulation and a resonant analogue filter — far ahead of its competitors. British composers such as Rob Hubbard, Martin Galway and Ben Daglish wrote C64 game themes that are still performed and remixed. The NES (Famicom in Japan, 1983) used the Ricoh 2A03's built-in sound, the voice of Koji Kondo's Super Mario and Zelda themes. The ZX Spectrum 128, Amstrad CPC, MSX and Atari ST used General Instrument's AY-3-8910 or Yamaha's compatible YM2149; the original Game Boy (1989) offered two pulse channels, a programmable 4-bit wave channel and noise.

The demoscene carried the music beyond games. Programmers and musicians in Europe, especially Scandinavia, Germany, Finland and Poland, made real-time audiovisual "demos" to show off what a machine could do, and their musicians competed on chip sound. On the Amiga, Karsten Obarski's Ultimate Soundtracker (1987) introduced the tracker — a vertical, numeric step sequencer — and the MOD file format; trackers became the standard way to write chip and sample music for decades. As CD audio and sampled sound took over games in the 1990s, the demoscene kept chip technique alive, and the Amiga and C64 "4-channel" sound became a nostalgic style in itself.

Around the turn of the millennium a new scene formed around portable hardware. Johan Kotlinski's Little Sound DJ (LSDJ) and Oliver Wittchow's Nanoloop turned the Game Boy into a pocket music workstation, and musicians started playing it live through mixers and PA systems. Online communities such as micromusic.net and labels such as 8bitpeoples in New York connected artists; 8bitpeoples' Blip Festival ran in New York from 2006, spread to Europe, Asia and Australia, and held its last edition in 2012. The documentary Reformat the Planet (2008) captured the scene at its peak.

In the 2010s chip sound became a mainstream reference point. Anamanaguchi, a New York band combining NES and Game Boy sounds with guitars and drums, scored the 2010 game Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: The Game. Chipzel wrote the soundtrack for Super Hexagon (2012). Indie games revived the 8-bit aesthetic on purpose, and emulation software such as FamiTracker, together with chip-modelling plug-ins, made the sound available to any producer — which also blurred the line between strict chiptune and music that only borrows its palette.

Each sound chip has its own character, and chip musicians often identify with one platform. The most important:

What identifies a chiptune track:

• Waveforms: square and pulse waves for leads and harmony, triangle or 4-bit wave for bass, white noise for snares and hi-hats.
• Duty-cycle changes: switching a pulse wave between 12.5%, 25% and 50% widths changes it from thin and nasal to hollow, and sweeping it gives a phasing, moving tone.
• Fast arpeggios: one channel cycles through a chord's notes at the frame rate (often 50 or 60 times a second), giving the impression of a chord from a single voice — chiptune's signature shimmer.
• Noise drums: short bursts of noise shaped by an envelope; on the NES, triangle "kicks" made with a quick pitch drop; on the C64, combined noise and pitch sweeps.
• Tempo: anything from slow ballads to 150–180 BPM dance and punk tracks; game-derived music clusters around 120–160 BPM.
• Harmony: often functional pop and classical progressions, with modal and minor-key heroism inherited from game themes.
• Hand-programmed expression: vibrato, slides and echo are written into the tracker as commands — an "echo" is often a second channel repeating the melody quietly a few steps later.
• Lo-fi artefacts: aliasing, quantised volume steps and the hum of real hardware are kept as part of the sound.

• Game soundtrack chip music — the original form, written within the limits of 1980s and early-1990s hardware; see video game music.
• Demoscene and tracker music — C64, Amiga and Atari compositions written for demos and music disks, often more ambitious than game music on the same chip.
• Game Boy and LSDJ scene — live performance on handheld consoles, ranging from dancefloor bangers to ambient.
• Bitpop — chip sounds combined with guitars, live drums and vocals; Anamanaguchi is the best-known example.
• Chip dance and chipstep — chip leads over house, techno, drum and bass or dubstep structures and modern low end.
• Nintendocore — a short-lived fusion of chip sounds with hardcore punk and metalcore, popular in the 2000s.
• FM and 16-bit — Mega Drive and arcade FM synthesis, often grouped with chiptune although the sound is different; its retro palette overlaps with synthwave.

Where to start:

• Rob Hubbard — C64 classics such as Monty on the Run (1985) and Commando (1985), the benchmark for SID composition.
• Martin Galway and Ben Daglish — fellow British C64 composers whose themes defined the machine's sound.
• Chris Hülsbeck — the German composer of the Turrican series, central to C64 and Amiga music.
• Koji Kondo — NES themes for Super Mario Bros. (1985) and The Legend of Zelda (1986), the most famous chip melodies ever written.
• Anamanaguchi — New York bitpop band; the Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: The Game soundtrack (2010) and Endless Fantasy (2013).
• Bit Shifter, Nullsleep and Trash80 — figures of the New York 8bitpeoples and Blip Festival scene.
• Chipzel — Game Boy musician from Northern Ireland; the Super Hexagon soundtrack (2012).
• YMCK — Japanese chip-pop trio with a clean, melodic 8-bit sound.
• Sabrepulse — Game Boy dance music crossing into breakbeat and drum and bass.

Chiptune is often confused with styles that share its references:

Chiptune's timbre is one of the most distinctive in electronic music. A spectrogram shows it clearly: square and pulse waves produce strong, evenly spaced odd harmonics extending far up the spectrum with no natural decay, the triangle bass is nearly pure, and the drums are broadband noise without the body of a sampled kick. Fast arpeggios show up as a rapid, regular alternation of pitches at the frame rate.

The difficulty is the label rather than the sound. Chiptune is not a broad category in most genre taxonomies, so a classifier may describe it by the music's structure — dance, pop or electronic — or by its association with games. Bitpop with guitars and live drums can pull towards rock. Try a track in the Genre AI music genre detector and compare the top answer with the alternatives.

What is chiptune?

Is chiptune the same as 8-bit music?

What is the difference between chiptune and video game music?

How is chiptune made today?

What is the SID chip?

Who are famous chiptune artists?