BY ANGELO VALDIVIA
Kenny McAlpine is a Scottish chiptune composer who resides as a fellow in Interactive Composition at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music. His work as a musician, educator, and author has led him all across the United Kingdom, United States, and Australia.
Kenny specialises in a specific corner of video game music: chiptune.
Since the 2000s, and more so in the last decade, chiptune music has surged in popularity as its own genre of music. Originally the product of limitations in earlier generations of video game hardware, the chiptune scene has its own musical artists who perform and record using either emulation (software-based sound systems) or modified game consoles — or both.
Here’s what Kenny had to say when we prodded him on this neo-retro phenomenon.
How did chiptune music start for you?
It all came from my love of video games. I grew up with the 8-bits — particularly Sinclair’s ZX Spectrum and Commodore’s C64 — and playing arcade games in that golden era when Pac-Man, Dig Dug, and Wonder Boy ruled the roost.
And, if I’m honest, I played video games way more than I should have done. So, while most of my school-friends were spinning vinyl and listening to Iron Maiden or Depeche Mode, I was listening to the soundtrack from Monty on the Run and One Man and His Droid on repeat. So chiptune, really, was the soundtrack to my childhood.
But the soundtrack that really got me hooked was Atari’s Paperboy. I spent most of the summer of 1984 pumping my pocket money into that cabinet. I loved the concept; I loved the graphics, and I loved the bike handlebars you used to control the game. But most of all, I loved the music. It had sardonic, sampled speech during the level intro that set you up for what is actually quite a sophisticated piece of soundchip-generated cool funk.
I love that track, and still gig live with it today.
In those earlier days when you began getting more invested in making chiptune music, did you foresee it being a viable way to develop a career?
Not then, no. All my 10-year-old self was thinking about was whether or not I could get through to the end-boss on R-Type with all my power-ups intact.
That said, even then, I realised that making games must be a job, and I remember telling my mum when I was about 10 or 11 that I was going to make games when I was older.
It wasn’t until a few years later — and by then, we were into the 16-bit era and soundtrackers — that I really began to think about pursuing a career in video game music.
By the time I got my first professional commission in 1997, we were well into the [3D] console era and production music. It took a while before chiptune came back around as a stylistic statement in game soundtracks.
How might someone get their start in making chiptunes today? Is it as easy as buying hardware online and tinkering?
I think tinkering is a great way to start, and the beautiful thing about chiptune is that it’s very, very accessible.
If we set aside the debate about authenticity and making on hardware versus emulation, one of the easiest ways to get going is to use one of the modern soundtrackers that is built around an emulated sound engine. GoatTracker, for example, is a good option. That runs on MacOS and emulates the Commodore SID sound chip.
FamiTracker on the PC emulates the Nintendo NES. Both give a tracker-style front end linked to a software emulation of the hardware without having to go to the challenge or expense of investing in, hacking, and maintaining original hardware, so it’s a really good way to dip your toes in the water and experiment.
As your experience grows, you might want to look to invest in some original kit, and I’d recommend picking up a Game Boy, which can still be had for a few tens of dollars from eBay and Gumtree, and a NanoLoop or LSDJ cartridge. The Game Boy is a great option, because it’s portable and moddable.
In terms of picking up hints and tips, there are loads of tutorials on YouTube, and some really great web forums, but one of the really nice things about chiptune is that it’s stylistically diverse. So my advice would be: whatever you’re into, just jump in and start making. Listen to other people’s tunes, and you’ll start to pick up all sorts of tricks for how to arrange your music — but focus on taking simple ideas and executing them beautifully!
In your experience, is there an age bracket at which interest in chiptunes stops? That is, is it just as popular to those who had Game Boys in the ’90s as it is with young people playing Fortnite today?
Well I’m ancient, and I love it!
If I’m honest, I’m more intrigued by younger musicians — kids who are much too young to have been around when that first generation of video game consoles and home computers was already obsolete — who have embraced chiptune as an expressive voice. That, to me, says that there’s something much more substantial to chiptune than just nostalgia.
I think chiptune appeals to different people in different ways. So while for me, nostalgia definitely plays a part, there’s much more going on.
There’s something very liberating about the limitations of chiptune that I think can be wonderfully creative; there’s a definite sense of retro-cool about the sound, and yet it also sounds very fresh and current as new musicians bring new ideas to the scene.
But more than anything, I think there’s just something joyous about chiptune. For me, it’s almost the ultimate feel-good music. Those things don’t depend on age.
In your time travelling and composing, and now teaching at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, have you noticed whether chiptune music is influenced differently by other cultures the same way classical, jazz, or rock and pop can be?
Yes, absolutely.
One of the things I found most fascinating about writing my book [Bits and Pieces: A History of Chiptunes, 2019] was in taking chiptune and situating it within a historical and cultural timeline. The influences are broader than you might imagine!
Some of the compositional techniques of chiptune has its roots in the Baroque, for example. Have a listen to some of Bach’s Partitas for Violin, and you get the sense that he was writing in a chiptune style 250 years before the SID chip came along.
There’s influence from the early electronic music pioneers of the 1950s, and stylistic influences from all over the place; although Jean-Michel Jarre, Kraftwerk, and Yellow Magic Orchestra feature prominently in the video game soundtracks of the 1980s.
The reverse is also true, though, as chiptune has had a significant influence on a lot of popular and commercial music. It helped shape the rave scene and the jungle scene of the late 1980s and early 1990s, and so it’s interesting to see some of those styles coming full-circle and driving some contemporary chip music. But have a listen to the opening of Girl by Beck, Vitamin by Kraftwerk, or La Roux’s Bulletproof; all of them drop chiptune sounds and musical devices into mainstream tracks.
Is there an untapped area where chiptunes hasn’t yet reached, and that you’d like it to — such as films and concert halls?
Actually, chiptune has reached some interesting places; everything from movie soundtracks through to international tours — even museum and gallery exhibitions.
I think the interesting thing is that, despite its reach, chiptune has always sat in the shadows, just below the mainstream, and that might be the perfect place for it. Part of its charm is it isn’t a mainstream style; it’s edgy, part of the digital underground. It’s the sound of geek rebellion!
I remember reading a quote in an article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette a few years ago: ‘Hoping to god this genre never goes mainstream. It’s too [expletive] brilliant to get run over by the masses.’ That pretty much sums it up for me.
Is there a particular game you would have loved to be a fly-on-the-wall for during its sound production?
Oh, now that’s a really difficult question!
Inside I’m basically an inquisitive seven-year-old. And, if I were given the chance, I’d be fascinated to sit and watch any of my favourite games come together, just so I could better understand the relationship between the artefact that is the game and all of the hard work that went into its development.
If you were to push me to pick just one, I think I might choose Elite’s Commando for the C64 from 1985. For one thing, the approach to sound production then was all code-based, so very different from the studio-based (or laptop studio-based) approach most of us are familiar with these days, but the story of the soundtrack is wonderfully dysfunctional and haphazard.
Rob Hubbard, the game’s composer, was invited down to the studios in Birmingham from his home in Newcastle. He arrived there late in the afternoon with a keyboard under his arm and a bunch of floppy disks in his back pocket. The production team took him out for a drink and a bite to eat, and then locked him in the office overnight to write the music. Before he emerged, all bleary-eyed the next morning, he set up all the computers in the office to play the music he’d spent the night writing: cacophonous pay-back for locking him in!
I don’t think that was the norm, even back in those early days of game development. But I think it would be fascinating to get a glimpse into that playful camaraderie at a time when the industry was still professionalising.
Kenny McAlpine was selected to co-present the panel The Evolution of Chiptune at APRA AMCOS High Score: Composition for Sound Art and Gaming on 5 October, 2019.
Niamh Houston (AKA Chipzel) and the Melbourne Chiptune Academy appear alongside him for this Melbourne International Games Week event.
READ NEXT: Mega Man‘s Manami Matsumae talks us through her creative process.
Image supplied. High Score illustration by Jennifer Reuter. Matsumae captured by Miguel Hasson.
