Artist Uses Game Boy Console to Make Chiptune Style Music

British artist Sam Battle (aka Look Mum No Computer) has taken a new approach to making music, or rather chiptunes, which is a genre of 8-bit tunes derived from video games — think of it as similar to EDM but in down-sampled form. This style of music was popular in the ‘80s and has since reemerged in the new century with some artists breaking into the mainstream, including Japanese music composers Yuzo Koshiro and Omodaka.

For his latest music venture, Battle hacked an old Game Boy for a new kind of musical instrument he paired with his analog synth machines. Battle found he could change the pitch of sounds by incorporating a precision oscillator (an LTC1799) soldered directly (by wire) into the Game Boy’s timing crystal. That oscillator enable him to over and under-clock the CPU to change the pitch of the electronic sounds.

Battle’s Game Boy musical endeavors aren’t limited to a single console either (he reportedly has over two hundred of them) as he’s actually strung three of them together — each acting as a separate oscillator that can be tuned independently.

He describes this setup as “3 Game Boys acting as separate oscillators, each separately tunable and synched together with a common oscillator driver with CV inputs on pitch and volume. A lot of other adjustments are made through the MIDI port.”

His Game Boy Triple Oscillator is essentially three Arduinoboys strung together and mounted onto an aluminum front panel with the electronics concealed behind it. These were also connected to his analog synth machines to deliver futuristic musical tones. Battle’s talent for creating musical instruments isn’t limited to the gaming consoles only, as he’s also created an Arduino Sequencer Keyboard that he uses to control a Furby Organ, he designed using 44 of the furry robots.