I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about Chiptune music lately—in part because it’s something I’m looking to write about in the future but also because I’ve recently started exploring composing music through trackers like MilkyTracker and LSDJ. The sound-visual relations brought up in Rickert/Salvo’s piece has got me thinking about the Demoscene/Chiptune communities and gatherings; in early fall, I went to a small Chiptune and Glitch Art festival in Evansville, IN, where musicians created music with a variety of electronic implements (including, in most cases, the Nintendo Game Boy) while visual artists used various programs to create dynamic, pixely, glitchy art in real time to pair with the music. The whole things was a super low-budget, hacked-together mess and the experience was incredible.

One of the things that struck me about Rickert/Salvo’s article was the part on GarageBand. I find really interesting their dissatisfaction with how unintuitive or difficult GB is to use—which, don’t get me wrong, it definitely is. But compared to the audio/visual trackers that are favored in the Demoscene/Chiptune communities, GB is incredibly user friendly. Part of the reason these trackers are so difficult to use is because they’re hacked together ROMs—with limited resources, it’s really difficult to create a user-friendly interface. And while there are no shortage of more friendly audio production tools that can produce the same kinds of sounds, these communities take a certain level of pride in using these hacked-together music-making programs instead. But even though the interface is not friendly, it still allows for the type of re/composition that Rickert and Salvo point out as being generative with GB.