[kortex]

Chip music / chiptune specifically to music produced on/for sound chips, or produced using tracker software which was commonly used to produce this kind of music.

"8-bit" is also often used to refer to the genre of chiptune, even though much of the music is produced for higher bit depth systems.

Many keygen tunes are chiptunes, produced on trackers, but many are not. Some are straight-up DnB, techno, or trance, not remotely chiptune. E.g. Here's a track from downthread which would be considered rave/ old skool / breakebeat hardcore or just "hardcore" (not to be confused with like a dozen other genres called "old skool" or "hardcore" (it's a very ineffable genre from a fairly narrow time period, from a fairly underground at the time subculture, who released via physically unstable "dubplates" that haven't survived well through digital archiving)).

https://cable.ayra.ch/webxmp/#835

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakbeat_hardcore

It's almost like language is fluid and descriptive, not proscriptive.

[jrm4]

Right, I tried to say this elsewhere; I ended up hearing a LOT of this music when it was actually being made, and neither "Chiptune" nor "Chip Music" was widely in use, if at all. If anything, "Tracker" was the word most used, I thing.

[daneel_w]

> "I ended up hearing a LOT of this music when it was actually being made, and neither "Chiptune" nor "Chip Music" was widely in use, if at all."

Thousands upon thousands of chiptunes were composed on the Amiga. Hundreds of chiptune collections and so-called "music disks" were made specifically targeting this subcategory. In the Amiga scene it was a musical artistic phenomenon in its own right, and the term was solidly cemented. What you're saying is not one bit in parity with reality.

And, they're all tracker modules, whatever the genre. Chiptunes are a specific subcategory.

[jrm4]

I suppose I wasn't clear -- I meant the actual term "Chiptune" or "Chip Music." I feel like it just wasn't called that back then, like those actual terms didn't show up until people actually began to seek out the sound as a retro thing.

I may be wrong here -- I can personally attest to consuming a lot of this material (demoscene stuff, games, tracker songs, etc) -- but I will admit I didn't make it or actually directly interact with many humans who did.

[daneel_w]

It was never really about the genre per se, though there is a certain artistic similarity that can be gleaned, similar to how e.g. Japanese game music of the early 90s has a certain red thread to it. It was always about the nature of the instruments used in the tracker music: a notable use of simple looped waveforms and minimal samples, instead of extended samples of a real or synthesized instrument, and often a desire to squeeze the file size of these tracker modules down to a minimum to the point where it became a bit of a craft to some. People (like me) who spent a lot of time in the scene when this era of computer music came into existence have a specific and widely shared opinion about what is a chiptune and what isn't.

[bananaboy]

I was only ever involved in the PC demoscene back in the day, and on that platform chiptunes generally referred to mods that were tiny, using very small samples or even not many samples e.g. playing the same samples at different pitches for different instruments.