ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses chip music with a historical perspective based in the 'demoscene', a subculture of creative computer users submitting their work to competitions with audio-visual productions programmed to be generated in real time for the viewer. As chip music has gained popularity, it has influenced and been influenced by other kinds of music, making it hard to maintain a purist technological definition. Fuelled by a growing popularity of 1980s culture, chip music has enjoyed success far beyond video games and demos. The noisier chip music, often released on low bit-rate Internet labels such as North American Hardcore or 20kbps Ree, has some common ground with the Protracker hardcore music in the 1990s. Although chip music songs were originally used in the demoscene due to their small file sizes, there would soon grow a small scene of dedicated chip music creators and listeners.
