While My Guitar Gently Bleeps
Seriously...
BBC
4.1 • 885 Ratings
🗓️ 14 June 2016
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A plumber eating a mushroom, and a spiny mammal jumping on a golden ring - you'd be forgiven for thinking these actions would make pretty indistinct or ambiguous sounds. But comedian, writer and musician Isy Suttie discovers why - thanks to Super Mario and Sonic the Hedgehog - they're some of the most evocative sounds of the 1980s and 90s. Along with these sounds, the plinky plonky music of early video games buried itself inside a generation of ears growing up among Commodores, Ataris, Segas and Nintendos. Loosely referred to as "chiptune", many musicians and producers now use the jagged, electronic textures in their songs, going to great lengths to deliberately limit their audio palette for the sake of authenticity; some even rip apart old computers and consoles to build instruments faithful to the original sounds. Its ubiquity in film and TV scores is another testament to its efficiency in evoking that era.
Isy traces the evolution of chiptune from early electronic music, looking at how composers like Hirokazu Tanaka and Koji Kondo created the catchy and unmistakeable themes of Tetris and Super Mario Brothers. She meets current chiptune artists, including the band whose instruments are joysticks and game controllers, and uses their advice to write her own digital classic. But can she convince the organisers of a die-hard gaming event to use it as their theme tune, and survive silicon scrutiny? Produced by Benn Cordrey.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Seriously, I'm Femi Martin. |
| 0:07.0 | This week we have an amazing story of two brothers in the early 80s who together solved the kidnapping of the older brothers partner Peach. |
| 0:17.0 | Now these brothers had to overcome the challenges of dangerous turtles, tricky pipe work, killer mushrooms, flaming lava pits. |
| 0:24.7 | Hold on a minute, that's that's Super Mario isn't it? |
| 0:27.6 | Yes, it is, because this is IsiSutti's program about Chip Tunes, so plug in and power up, press |
| 0:38.1 | start and get ready for while my guitar gently bleeps. Oh, great, I'm dead again. |
| 0:44.0 | In fact, I'm dead again. In fact, I should rename this game, Dead again. |
| 0:58.0 | I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm Izzie Sottie and I always wanted to design my own computer game when I was little |
| 1:06.1 | one where I got to save all of new kids on the block from evil aliens or one where I turned |
| 1:11.4 | all my teachers to cuddly toys incapable of telling me not to let new kids on the block help me with my math homework. |
| 1:16.5 | Yeah, I liked new kids on the block. |
| 1:18.5 | I often wonder how my life would have turned out if I'd created my own game, but since I never learned how to use a computer |
| 1:24.4 | very well and don't own a time machine, it's a bit of a pipe dream. |
| 1:30.0 | The main reason I'm still nostalgic about games of that era is the sound. |
| 1:34.2 | I love the bleeps, bloops and blerks, even the noises they made when you died. |
| 1:39.2 | And most of all, the incredibly catchy music that despite hearing it for hours on end I never got bored of. |
| 1:45.8 | And it wasn't just me. |
| 1:50.4 | Many contemporary pop songs dip into that same electronic palette, like bulletproof by Louro. This time maybe I'll be... |
| 2:28.8 | A.m. 180 by Granddaddy. and Famolan by UK Grim Artist JME. They all sound like they've been played on a game and there are people taking it to much further lengths ripping open games machines to get at the sound-making circuitry inside, but we'll meet them later. |
| 2:35.0 | Few things bring me back to my adolescence quicker than the game and the music you've just heard. |
| 2:43.8 | The mesmerizing drone of Tetris on the Nintendo Game Boy, courtesy of Hirokasi Tanaka, |
| 2:49.2 | wove itself into the teenage tapestry of a generation along with others like Sonic the Hedgehog |
... |
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