Amid all the chaos I thought the only thing I could  do to help was to put together a complation of chip music help raise donations and awareness for the people of Japan in their difficult time. If it wasn’t for the hard working people of Japan there would be none of this great chip tune music in the first place.

The compilation is available now! In exchange we simply ask you to donate or do something positive for Japan. We will not be collecting any money ourselves, we are using First Giving to help collect money on behalf of the Red Cross to aid in the Tsunami relief campaign here.

Current Artists include, over 100 in total

Pixelh8 | Jellyfish Lunchbox | Facundo | Bit_Rat | bit mummy | Abortifacient | little-scale and Poppi Doser | b4kn | bit face | Bear & Walrus | Seventh Gear | Fury in the Fire | receptors | crashfaster | ondoh | _node | Glomag | Andrew Kilpatrick | Neurofllip | aircrash alive | 8 Bit Weapon | PANDAstar | poisoncut | Diamonds & Dynamite | Comptroller | Palace Cat | Lucy Lefty | Space Town Savior | Starbuck | Nathan Meunier | Da Pantz | Jonny Nero Action Hero | Josh Whelchel | 8bit bandit and Zane | Droid-On and Mika Y | MOUTHLESS | dixan/mfx^sk^sfc | ne7 | Katon (feat. Cafechan) | Br1ght Pr1mate | Saskrotch | Joseph K | Numbers in Love | jefftheworld | Samwave | My Brother Daniel | BFunk20xx | TEMPHUiBIS | Danimal Cannon | Glowing Stars | DJ Blackmarker | gwEm and Counter Reset | Neurobit | Ovenrake | lazerbeat | scrumtoe | easyname | Zebra | Holy Konni | Jonas The Plugexpert | Euan Lynn | Obsolète Broadcast Système | Bud Melvin | Byzanite | Je deviens dj en 3 jours | E U C A R Y O T E | The Attic Bits | Khades | The MM Project | DYLANBROCHILL | Feryl | MattyBoJangles | Louis G. | Hyperwave | NEIGE | leeni | ComputeHer | Prizmatic Spray | Steve | Forbidden Colour | Neil Voss | Rainbow Jump Orchestra! | Kris Keyser and AdamGetsAwesome | Of Japan | Exilefaker | Psifork | Chetreo | Wizwars | Matecha | 8GB | Peter Swimm | Nick Maynard | taiiga | Sabrepulse | Jellica | Untested Methods | µB | Creutzfeldt Jacky | Stu | Supercommuter | Supersole | tempsoundsolutions | Shrimps | Pulselooper | Falling For A Square | Subway Sonicbeat | Mystic Hero | Beverage | Zonic | Cityscape, Go! | Battle Lava | Inverse Phase | Adelina Turcu – Sorin Tudor (piano) | The Munitionettes | Active Knowledge | Nekoya | Mark Denardo f/ Bit Shifter

V2 is already available for download and features 90 tracks!!!

I have also asked @TCTD (on Twitter) to help organise it, we want any and all chip tuners involved the more the better. If you can please help spread the word.  You can follow me @pixelh8 and @TCTD on twitter for updates. If your an artists submit tracks to @TCTD on Twitter!!! ASAP!

Press and blog articles relating to the project can be found here: BBC Radio Suffolk, The Nerdy Show,  Albotas,  Thinq, Hipster, Please!, The Chip Tune Blog,  Nathan Meunier, GamePron,  Go Nintendo, GameSetWatch, The Warp Pipe, Motherboard, Tiny Cart,  PixelKitsch, Reino do Cogumelo, Obsolete Broadcast System

Album art by Keff

Still working on it, still trying to make it special, and unlike anything before. The album is divided between “Software” happy pop chip tunes and “Hardware” aggressive noise experimental chip tunes,  new recording techniques and should hopefully be out this year. It will only be featuring computers from the 1980′s Zx Spectrums, BBC Micros, Acorn Electrons, Commodore 64s, Orics, Dragon 32s and so on.  As you may have guessed I am prepapring for my PhD and it is taking up a lot of time and rightly so,  once things are moving I’ll have a few months to finish off this double album epic.  In the meantime here is a free track “SuperPosition” (Right-click-save-as) and yes that is a BBC Micro through a Wah-Wah pedal :)

I was fortunate enough to present some of my research at the Society for Education, Music and Psychology Research conference at the University of Reading as a poster.  The research “Re-designing the familiar:  How effective are directional control pads in the musical education of 8 – 12 year old children?” looked at whether music skills learnt inside a video game could be transferred outside of the video game as real world musical skills. The software was created using a generic usb control pad and a standard PC, with software developed using open frameworks.

It was another good SEMPRE conference for me and again very useful, it was only my second conference and I was made to feel very welcome. It is always good to talk to people who share a common passion of music education.

In the final installment of the three lectures at Anglia Ruskin, Cambridge we looked at the history of video game sound and music from Asteroids to Audiosurf, from Donkey Kong to Donkey Konga, Pac-man to Vib Ribbon.  Looking how small a role music initially played in games in comparison to current day use and music based games.

The second half of the lecture broke down three Xbox 360 games, their use of music and sound as part of the narrative and  game play.

The session ended with a small bit of Foley work showing them how simple it can be to make sound effects for their films and video games using everyday household items, I look forward to hearing the feedback from the other tutors and to see if some of them take up the challenge to make their own sounds for their games. A big thanks to Steven Harris at Anglia Ruskin for organising the sessions.