Diode Milliampere holds an ancient Toshiba laptop up to the camera of a more modern laptop, so that the window of our Skype conversation fills with a flickering, constantly refreshing grid of numbers and letters. The churn of seemingly incomprehensible codes, rendered in the blocky MS-DOS system font, looks like the kind of raw data you might see flashing across a monitor on a factory floor or in a water-treatment plant, but it’s actually a musical performance of a sort. The strings of cryptic alphanumeric combinations are real-time instructions that the Toshiba is feeding into its sound card, and they’re producing the cheery, chirpy techno-pop tune that’s streaming out of my speakers.
Chiptune sounds have been bubbling up into the mainstream for years. The Timbaland-produced 50 Cent single “Ayo Technology” (from 2007) and Kesha’s 2009 hit “Tik Tok” both brought NES-style eight-bit tones to the Billboard top ten, and tracks by crossover EDM artists such as Skrillex and Deadmau5 often feature the genre’s trademark burbles and beeps. For hard-core chiptune enthusiasts, though (many of whom gather in online forums, including Reddit’s /r/chiptunes), the music itself isn’t the main concern. It’s often treated as little more than a by-product of the hackerish quest to get into a sound module and make it do what you want—extra points if what you want is something it wasn’t designed for.
