Using online/offline methods: An ethnography of chip music and its scene

Editor’s note: This week, Marilou Polymeropoulou, D.Phil student at the Oxford University Faculty of Music, talks about her work trying to understand creativity in chip music, a type of electronic music composed on retro videogame and computer consoles. For Marilou’s thesis entitled: “Limitation and Creativity in Chip Music: an Ethnographic Perspective”, she conducted online and offline ethnographic fieldwork among the transnational community of chip music for the last two years. The methodological focus of her work promotes an ethnomusicological perspective on creativity and assesses technology from a sociological viewpoint. Marilou developed a set of ethnomethodological tools to juxtapose and combine the online/offline binary which she talks about in her short post below. 

Check out past posts from guest bloggers. 

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Desert Planet (FI) perform at Eindbaas 9 in Utrecht, NL (13/4/12)

Chip music is a type of electronic music composed on retro videogame consoles and computers such as Commodore 64, Atari ST, Amiga and the Nintendo Gameboy but also on any computer that can simulate the retro consoles’ sound chip. “Chiptunes”, “8-bit”, “micromusic” and “fakebit” are some terms associated with chip music. The chipscene is a transnational community which emerged online in late ’90s but its historical background is rooted deep into the ‘80s subcultural community, the Demoscene. Why use retro machines to create music? This is not the easiest question to answer. In some respects, it is all about expanding the limitations of these machines. “Why not?”, is a response I often receive by my informants. “It’s fun!” others acclaim.

Setting up the gear at the Analog Attack event, London, UK (7/4/12)

Ethnography assisted me in finding a meaningful truth of chip music and of what it has to offer to the academic discourse of music studies. The question is however, how does one conduct and juxtapose multi-sited and online ethnography with a transnational group of people? I used a selection of ethnographic methods, which can be summed up in the following bullet points:

• Snowballing. My story with the chipscene begun when I met Tonylight a chiptune artist who was visiting Athens, Greece for an event. Tonylight introduced me to Javier, a director who was working on a documentary about the chipscene: “Europe in 8 bits” (see video). And from then on I met several people that were somehow connected.
• Lurking. I lurked online in 8bitcollective.org (servers are down for about a year now) and micromusic.net for enough time in order to learn the dynamics of the community online.
• Participant observation. I followed Javier’s team in Europe and I experienced chip music in a different cultural setting – in Italy, Spain, France, England, the Netherlands and Germany. In addition, I attended virtually events which were broadcast online (e.g. Eindbaas 8 in Utrecht and the last Blip Festival in Tokyo) where users had the opportunity to interact via a chat room.
• Interviews. This was the starting point of my ethnography. However, chip music is part of club culture and it was not always possible to interview people for a variety of reasons. While I was in the field, I attempted to record an interview at every opportunity. With some informants I found correspondence via e-mail or Facebook to be more efficient.