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We're the operators of our pocket calculators !!

Decades after Kraftwerk uttered this phrase in their ode to geekdom, we find the embodiment of their vision of the future of music and technology in our palms. Handheld music-making has arrived and one form is garnering attention not just for it's portability, but for it's unique sound and the associations that come attached.

Gameboy music is music created on a gameboy usually using one of several independently produced applications that are available for sale on the internet. The two most popular were both created in 1999. Nanoloop (www.nanoloop.com) is the brain child of Oliver Wittchow from Wuppertal, Germany and Little Sound DJ (www.littlesounddj.com) was made by Johan Kotlinski in Stockholm, Sweden. They are burned onto commercially available gameboy cartridges they rely mostly on the sounds generated by the hardware in the gameboy itself.


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Using these and other programs, musicians can turn their gameboy into a note sequencer as well as a sound editor, composing complex and varied pieces of music. Gameboy music is a sub-genre of micromusic- music from small or portable devices, and chiptunes- music from game devices. The scene is spread across the globe with centers in Wuppertal, Stockholm, Paris, Brussels, Vienna, Warsaw, Ankara, Barcelona, London, Tokyo, Buenos Aires, New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Baltimore and the list is growing. Styles range from game theme homage (sometimes called demos), to hard drum & bass and IDM, to avant garde and noise collage. The remarkable thing that many notice about the movement is the breadth of styles that can come from such a small, limited device.


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Many gameboy musicians will tell you that the limitations of music on a gameboy are precisely the most attractive attributes. The limited CPU insures a relatively scaled down feature set which many feel forces the composer to be creative. The 8 bit sound is crunchy-squelchy-cool and seems to be highly intoxicating to chip fetishists and novices alike. There just always seems to be something happy about even the most noise-driven music created on a gameboy, as if the little 6-pixel characters from Zelda and Mario are bringing us the joy of their tiny world personally. Finally, what could be cooler than carrying your instrument in your pocket and writing music on the subway?

A number of gameboy bands with vocalists have sprung up and the ability to synchronize gameboys via gamelink cables has encouraged several gameboy 'orchestras' and large performing groups. Gameboy music matches have been webcast live with competitors on opposite sides of the Atlantic. Micromusic festivals are occurring more frequently and traveling across oceans. At the moment we are stilll able to call ourselves a niche genre but with established artists like Beck and Malcolm McLaren using gameboys, can the mainstream be far off?

The bleep of 'pocket calculator' music seems destined to make it's mark.

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