8 bit Sound Club and 23rd of Thrimidge

Unified Sound Era

(original larger post at my gaming blog)

Something is missing from today's gaming.  When you hear the words "8 bit" and maybe "retro" you get this thought in your head of how things should look, but a huge part of it is how things should SOUND.  Think of your favorite games from the NES era, and you might notice that they all sound very similar.  This doesn't happen in today's gaming, but why?  Well there answer here is that the NES used a synthesizing sound chip instead of digital music.

The sound chip inside it had its set of blips and beeps(wave modulations actually), and the games issued commands of what order they were played in(triangles, white noise, square waves).  Let me put it another way.  With digital, you can record a wide variety of instruments, orchestras, and bands.  You are only limited by reality and sample quality.  The Nintendo Entertainment System shipped with a pre-packed band that you could not change.  All games had the same guitar, bass, and drums that all the others had.  Starting with the SNES, music went digital.  SNES music was pre-recorded, digitized and played back at a later date, much like how MP3's work.  Your Nintendo Entertainment System was an actual music instrument playing live for you.

DJ culture in Japan and Korea is huge, and their forefathers are the game composers from this era of gaming with sound chips.  In that area you will not only find "8 bit" synth masters, but also "16 bit" because the Sega Genesis also used a sound chip instead of a digital system.  The "west" culture is awakening to the sound, but its old hat over there, where the actual composers of games of the era are producing music in the clubs.  Today in the west, we are modifying old NES's and Gameboys to be used live in synths.  This too has been going on for a long while in Korea and Japan, where these systems(especially with the Sega Genesis) were actually pretty powerful for this purpose, and very cost effective compared to dedicated synthesizers in the 80's and early 90's.

23rd of Thrimidge

Bird update: At least one of the chicks seems to have lived through it all and is growing fairly quickly.  They have gotten large enough that they do not make sound unless the mom is feeding it, something I have not witnessed.  A few years ago I heard baby birds for a week while they were on a nest at the porch, but the truck is too far away for me to hear.  It looks like they should be moved out by next Monday, I'll keep my fingers crossed.

Lots of wind with the rain yesterday in my area.  It did not seem like a hugely strong wind storm, but the wind never stopped, sort of like when we have left overs of hurricanes come through.  Since the trees don't get a rest between gusts, many of them break; including our oldest apple tree.  Before I lived here a tornado actually hit the home and ripped the roof off.  The apple tree eventually grew back after this attack, and so maybe it will survive this wind storm as well.

I will be starting my next book trilogy today.  I have decided on reading the Riddle Master of Hed trilogy by Patricia A. McKillip.  It is a shorter set of books, each one being a little over 200 pages, but from what I have read about McKillip, she is a "never waste a word" kind of writer that puts actual art and thoughtfulness into her writing.  That actually makes me a little nervous because I'm more of a "write plainly" kind of person, but I hear she is not pretentious, just very artful.