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1UP COVER STORY
1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF JUNE 25 | VIDEO GAME MUSIC FESTIVAL
The Magic of FM Synth
Cover Story: A history of the world’s coolest brand of chiptune and its many personalities.
B
ack before chiptunes were known as chiptunes, video game music came from a couple of primary electronic sources with their own labels. Pulse code modulation (PCM) was the main technique that gave us the sonically simple sounds of the NES and its 8-bit brethren, and indeed was the foundation of electronic sound in computer systems.
On the other end of the spectrum was frequency modulation (FM) synthesis, a technique that used the basic concept of FM to create more complex tones than PCM. Synthesized music via analog electronics reached the mainstream in the late 1970s and the 1980s, lending a distinctive science-fictiony sound to pop and rock music, but FM synth was designed to be digital; sound produced through programmable integrated circuits. As you’ll find out, as FM synth seeped into consumer electronics, video games saw a brilliant new movement of music creation that transformed the “bleeps and bloops” of PCM into richer compositions that intended to bring game music closer to the stuff at the record store (however slightly), but ended up carving out a wonderful little niche in the world of chiptunes.
