Linus Åkesson’s Chipophone is an organ in which he replaced the guts with microcontrollers that produce the typical chiptunes sounds. It’s a very fun-looking device for playing music that was designed to be played by a chip “live,” and Linus is clearly a skilled player of it.

What I find the most amazing, though, are the various ways he’s found to play with the fact that chiptunes is generally a music listened to as a recording. There are typical features like a step sequencer and arpeggiator that seem to take on new meaning in the context of live chiptunes playing, but the craziest thing for me is the “fadeout button” he demonstrates. After he presses it, he continues to play, while the volume automatically decays. It’s a fantastic incorporation of something very distinctly “record-like” into live performance.

(via everyone)

Tristan Perich’s newest release in his set of 1-bit compositions is set to be released in August. Like his 1-Bit Music, the music is produced by a microchip stuck inside a CD jewel case.

I love this stuff because of the intentional play Tristan engages in around the ideas of “performance” and “liveness”: since the chip produces the music (in 1-bit, no less), it can be said to play “live.” Of course, this is similar to the way a player piano might be said to play “live,” in the way that “live” has come to mean “not on an audio recording.” 1-bit audio doesn’t need to be processed as it comes out of the chip—the ons and offs translate directly into the motion of the speaker cone—so it has a kind of immediacy.

Tristan was kind enough to sit in on a class I was taking at MIT last year and talk about his work with the Loud Objects, which provided me with the material to write an article about this kind of immediacy and “liveness” in the context of noise art. Maybe someday, when I’m done polishing up another thing, I’ll get back to that one and make it postable.

(via Synthtopia)

This is really neat: a history of PC audio, showing the audio cards and playing the corresponding version of the theme from Monkey Island.

I am somehow nostalgic for the time when you had to compose the music specifically for the hardware. But only a little: can someone suggest a way to compose specifically for contemporary computer audio hardware? There must be some way to get past its “universal” ability to reproduce sound and find its specific weirdnesses. (This might also help augment this history that stops in the mid-90s once “CD quality audio” arrives, as if the history has been nothing but an increase in fidelity and CD quality represents a reasonable endpoint.)

(via Retro Thing)