Computer made music

Chiptune is a music category that has grown over the last few years and it is composed often by musicians, users and fans of old computers. This new music category is growing thanks to a generation whose childhood was affected in some way by computers.

Those who were born in the 70‘s and 80’s know exactly what about I’m writing, because in those days anyone who could get any kind of computer now was able to remember the magic behind it’s sounds and songs created for those machines.

If you lived those magic days, brands like Commodore, Apple, Texas, Philips are familiar to you and some systems and computers standards like C64, AppleII, Amiga, Spectrum, Amstrad CPC and MSX in some way have had some importance and maybe influenced you in your career or hobby.

Today several mainstream artists have been submitting their songs to be produced by producers that were influenced by C64 game made songs and by Amiga demosceners artists. The most famous example of this influence is a recent scandal involving the well known producer Timbaland that has been accused of plagiarism by Amiga computer fans, when he worked for Nelly Furtado’s album, Loose, released in 2006.

Comparing both songs

This is a well known story and in fact Timbaland revealed to have plagiarized some elements of several Amiga’s composers including the demoscener artist Janne Suni (a.k.a Tempest). One of the songs plagiarized by Timbaland was composed by Tempest for the Oldskool Music competition (Assembly 2000) which occurred in 2000 in Helsinki, Finland and reached the first place in the competition.

Nice try Timbaland 🙁
.

To be continued...

[]’s
PopolonY2k

Reference

ChipTune (Wikipedia)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiptune

Timbaland (Wikipedia)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timbaland

Nelly Furtado (Wikipedia)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nelly_Furtado

Timbaland Plagiarism controversy (Wikipedia)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timbaland_plagiarism_controversy

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2 thoughts on “Computer made music”

  1. Oi! Popolon! Total Atari (Nintendo, Sega…) disregard? NO!

    😉

    BTW I think “not familiar” should have been just “familiar”, otherwise it makes little sense.

    Also, “Do it” was supposedly ripped from a C64 tune (same way as Zombie Nation nicked the core part of “Kernkraft 400”), and replayed by Timbaland on a SIDstation, but it was recomposed for a SID-styled Amiga MOD as well…

    1. Hi Tahrey.

      In fact I didn’t ignore Atari, Nintendo and Sega but (except by Atari), Sega and Nintendo were not home computers, so I dindn’t consider them in my post just for this reason but in fact you’re right because Nintendo and Sega are part of Chiptune culture today 🙂

      About the “not familiar”, Thanks, after writing this text I didn’t realize this mistake. Now is fixed.

      Thanks for the “extra” information about “Do it”.

      []’s
      PopolonY2k

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