atari audio
Since Saturday’s Form, Culture and Video Game Criticism conference, I’ve been thinking about music composed using sounds from games consoles (in particular, the Atari 2600). What follows is a collection of notes and links to resources on projects involving such music composition.
First up, Binary Noiz Series 00 and Binary Noiz Series 01 by Astrogenic Hallucinauting. AtariAge explains: “The source material for each of these discs comes from home videogames (Atari Jaguar, Turbo Grafix, Nintendo, etc.), arcade machines, the Commodore 64 SID chip, the noizSPIKE-2600/R (a rack mounted Atari 2600), handhelds, and the like.” Check out MP3 samples of So Flow, created using “nanoloop, arcade machine, Atari 2600, sid station, 10 in 1 TV Game,” and Indirect Addressing, consisting of sounds from “Turbo Express TG-16, noizSPIKE-2600/R, arcade machines, 127 in 1 Power Player.”
Also available from AtariAge is The Bad Method by Naked Intruder, which consists entirely of Atari 2600 sounds. Four MP3 samples from the disc are available online: Semaphore, Sheep Rhetoric, Malgorithm and We’ve Lost Engine No. 2. The Bad Method is the first disc in the Prime Directives trilogy, which also includes The Human Voice, an album that uses nothing but standard and modified Casio SK-1 keyboards as sound sources, and the upcoming disc The Last Vestige, which was composed using the Nintendo Entertainment System 2A03 Pseudo-Audio Processing Unit. Two MP3 clips from The Human Voice may be downloaded: Artificial Banana Flavor and Sixth Finger Syndrome.
Golden Shower, an electronic music duo from Sao Paulo, Brazil, won “Best Electronic Music Video” at the MTV Brasil Video Music Awards 2000 for Video Computer System, described by its creators as: “[A] tribute to all the classic Atari 2600 video games of the early ’80s. We tried to join together as many traditional game themes of that era as possible in a linear storyline, so we have this character who goes through all kinds of perils, such as jumping over sharks and battling alien starships, in his way to a Golden Shower concert. The whole thing started with the Video Computer System song, which was made entirely out of original Atari game sounds. Then the concept of the video came out naturally, as the idea was to do something in that style, very low-res, big pixels and sharp colors. But with a few quirks, as with the fast editing and that 3D sequence in the middle, that prevent the video from being just a collection of old game scenes.” Read more about the making of the video here.
Incorporating music with actual gameplay, Paul Slocum hacked Atari 2600 games Combat and Beserk to produce Combat Rock and Mr. Roboto: “Combat now plays Clash’s Rock the Casbah while you blast tanks” while “Berzerk now plays Mr. Roboto by Styx [as] you exterminate the robots.” Audio samples can be downloaded here (Combat Rock) and here (Mr. Roboto).
And finally, not a musical by-product of 8-bit games consoles but rather a conflation of retro gaming and contemporary cool, Homestar Runner RPG for the Atari 2600 is “[t]he first official Homestar Runner video game for a game console, RPG syle.” The game will be released in May as both an Atari 2600 cartridge and ROM, but a demo ROM is already available online. (However, I can’t get it to run correctly using version 1.2 of Stella on Mac OS X.)