NES/Famicom Music at VG Music Conference

I will be giving a presentation on the Compositional Techniques of Chiptune Music at the North American Conference on Video Game Music at Texas Christian University on January 18, 2015. Information about the presentation and the conference can be found at this website: http://vgmconference.weebly.com (current as of December 24, 2014).

This presentation is a culmination of over two years of research and work including accurate note and effect transcriptions of eight full NES and Famicom soundtracks as well as additional tracks from a dozen more. I got in touch with composers Masashi Kageyama, Neil Baldwin, Alberto Jose Gonzalez, and Troupe Gammage, as well as NESDev members Bucky and Matrixz who assisted with software tools and sound engine dissection at the programming level. Brent Weinbach of the Legacy Music Hour shared how he raises awareness of 8 and 16-bit video game music and the composers who wrote it on his weekly podcast. I had the assistance of a Japanese translator who translated numerous webpages and facilitated composer interviews. All of this work appears in full in my doctoral dissertation which is pending approval.

The documentation available from this forum and the Wiki page was a valuable resource in forming a connection between the musical characteristics found through my transcription work and the programming challenges presented by the NES and Famicom soundchips. I will be pleased to acknowledge the contributions of the NESDev community in the area of NES programming and the individuals who make this community thrive.

Do you plan to mention homebrew NES music engines, such as NerdTracker II, MCK, MUSE, FamiTracker, FamiTone, etc.?

My presentation used visuals and audio to show what actually occurs on each sound channel of the NES and Famicom to produce the sounds and effects that are associated with chiptunes. I included audio that was slowed down to demonstrate the rapid arpeggiation borrowed from Commodore 64 music composition and that is associated with European composers. I also included proper musical treatment of loop starts and ends and the pros and cons of artificial reverberation with two sound channels. There wasn't enough time to go into programming details like sound engines and subroutines, but those areas appear in my doctoral dissertation from which my conference work is based.

You can view the slideshow from the conference here: Compositional Techniques of Chiptune Music

This is great, I'm really excited to see this.

I bought a couple Sunsoft games in preparation