Maelstrom - ©Leif Chappelle 2009

You may be tempted to hit play, but hear me out first:

I’ve long been praising chiptunes on this blog — for good reason, mind — without actually taking the dive myself. There’s one thing that can be said about music, non-tangible as it is: It’s hard to really understand at its core until you get your hands dirty and do it yourself. You can appreciate it, you can jump up and down in excitement at a rockin’ chorus, but understanding comes from doing.

Does that sound too pretentious? I hope not!

Granted, the doing can be applied to performance just as much as it is creation. Singing your favorite song or melody can act as a form of performance that enhances understanding. Thing is, with stuff of a digital medium it’s a bit difficult to perform unless you’re a professional synthesizer operator. (Props to those folks.)

That said, this week I decided to take that dive and try my hands at tracking out some old-school chiptunes. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do, but lacked the knowledge or experience to wrap my head around it. Thankfully, I found a lovely little program called BoyScout that enabled me gain just that: a toolbelt filled with sound emulation from the late GameBoy.

Not really a looker, is it?

The above are two screenshots from a portion of the BoyScout interface, the left-most being a single cell of music data from one of the instruments, the right-most being the overall sequencer for all four tracks.

Knowing my game music history helped a bit with this one: The original GameBoy was an 8-bit game machine, meaning that it had the capacity for four channels of audio playing at once. Two channels were dedicated to square waves, one channel had a customizable waveform, and the fourth provided white noise. The channels were used universally between both music and sound effects, meaning that composers had to keep in mind that at any moment one of their precious channels could be taken over by a sword slash or jump.

That entire concept however brings with it an inspiration for polyrhythmic writing. Since the channels can change their settings on the fly, so long as the two lines don’t overlap, one can create multiple “voices” in a single channel to create the illusion of far more than four things happening at once.

And so the idea for an almost overwhelmingly polyrhythmic piece came to be. There are multiple repeating ideas that could be grasped onto as the concept of a down-beat, none of which entirely wrong, but none of which totally stable either.

There will certainly be more to come!