SAN MATEO, California — Jordan Gray makes music from the plinking tones of hacked handheld videogames.
A former punk rocker who salvaged damaged toys to use as instruments during his high school years, he went on to make music with synthesizers and MIDI sequencers before settling on his current instruments of choice: a vintage Nintendo Game Boy and a PlayStation Portable.
“Inside of the Game Boy there are four monophonic synthesizers and you can have really good control over those,” Gray told Wired.com at the Maker Faire here last weekend. “It’s super-fast to compose music on it, even though it has a limited interface.”
Gray, who performs as Starpause and helped organize Maker Faire’s Digital Sound Space, is one of a growing number of artists making music with outdated gaming gear. Their genre, known as chiptune, has become a club phenomenon, with artists hacking everything from Commodore 64s to Nintendo Entertainment Systems to make the vintage gear’s sound chips produce dance jams and 8-bit remixes.
Gray’s music, which you can hear in the song “chastek9d” below, takes the happy electronic tones of the handheld devices and makes them sound almost sluggish. Combined with driving beats, his tunes work in both the nightspot and the game room.
For the most part, Gray composes using sounds native to the handhelds, making music and loops in real time. The PSP provides a more sophisticated sonic palette while the Game Boy makes a grittier old-school noise. Gray also creates his own samples and load them on to his devices.
Gray crafts the music on his Game Boy using homebrew software called Little Sound DJ that’s recorded to a blank game cartridge. When he DJs at clubs, he mixes the Game Boy’s sounds with those coming from a firmware-hacked PlayStation Portable running custom software known as LittleGPTracker(sometimes called “the piggy” or “piggy tracker”).
The programs might look rudimentary — see a demo of how LittleGPTracker works in the video below — but there’s genius in that simplicity.
“It’s all part of this homebrew development scene where people repurpose these systems to make music and art with them just by writing new software for them,” Gray said.
Jordan Gray at the 2011 Maker Faire.
Photos: Jon Snyder/Wired.com
Photos: Jon Snyder/Wired.com
It’s a scene that’s growing. At Maker Faire this year, the Digital Sound Space featured 21 artist performances over the course of two days, including musicians like Mr. Spastic andMorgan Tucker (aka crashfaster), who both compose on Game Boy, NES and Commodore 64. (Grab a compilation of the artists who performed at Maker Faire from 8bitsf.com.)
There’s also a burgeoning cadre of people ready to listen. Gray and Tucker, who also helped organize the Digital Sound Space, throw a bimonthly party in San Francisco called PulsewaveSF, which is a collaboration with a chiptune party called Pulsewave in New York. Other chip scenes have beensprouting up worldwide.
The music of these PSP-wielding chiptune artists like Gray not only gives new purpose to devices of yore, it also means a low barrier to entry for musicians who don’t want to spin records or play traditional instruments.
“I think it’s great because these things, no one really wants them any more, so you can get them for less than 100 bucks,” Gray said. “And you can have a music studio instead of playing games or having them be discarded entirely.”
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