Comments on: Kids Making Electronic Music, 60s-80s, on CD

By: ScottFlavin

ScottFlavin — Thu, 01 May 2008 15:57:20 +0000

I’m still in high school and, with my extremely limited budget, I have been attempting to create electronic music for a couple of years now. This site has helped me out in so many ways by not only introducing me to innovative approaches to music creating electronic music, but most importantly providing me with free music apps. I’m almost done with my senior year and my many partially finished songs are coming to a closure. Nothing to share now but just a reminder that there ARE high-schoolers that have this site set as their homepage! You’re my hero Peter Kirn! (as well as the rest of you guys at cdm!)

By: Kids making electronic music 2 « Everything’s gone green - The world of mistrust music

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 21:26:26 +0000

[...] Kids making electronic music [...]

By: mistrust

mistrust — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 14:44:37 +0000

@Peter Kirn:
Thanks!

By: Peter Kirn

Peter Kirn — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 14:08:32 +0000

@mistrust: excellent. Totally excellent.

By: mistrust

mistrust — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 13:20:55 +0000

My dad was a TV engineer in the 60s and 70s, so he had allsorts of circuit testers and oscilloscopes and other bits of junk that I could mess around round and make odd bleeps and sinewave wails! first synth in about 1980 – a Casio MT31 recorded onto a Phillips hi-fi. Recently, I’ve found myself going back to all my old gear to make some new tunes with it. I put one of my tracks from about 1984 on my blog, so have a listen if you dare!
This is the Mood I’m in (by mistrust) – more info at mistrustmusic.co.uk

By: Peter Kirn

Peter Kirn — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 03:57:00 +0000

@llamastorm … no, I agree, totally. Yeah, Mac OS comes with, uh, Xcode, but that’s not exactly Hypercard or BASIC. On the other hand, some of those tools are there if you want them. You can still write BASIC. You can use LOGO (reborn as netlogo, built in Java). So, in other words, unlike many of the things we’ve lost, since this is all bits and bytes, there’s nothing stopping kids from playing with these things. We do have all these additional possible solutions, but then, that’s the job of educators to put that stuff up in front of people. (I had BASIC on my first machine; didn’t necessarily know what to DO with it, though!)

By: llamastorm

llamastorm — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 03:32:48 +0000

my point was that today people feel they have to make a better Quake — which is itself much less accessible, and that the tools available to build simple fun things have grown more complex — if only by a factor of 3 or so. You no longer get basic just “installed” and don’t have the simple access to DOS modes. It’s a culture thing, things get commercialized and enterprisey. What would happen if all Playstations came with a free simple development kit? Alas poor mode 13h. In other news: Hey you whippersnappers, get off my lawn.

By: Peter Kirn

Peter Kirn — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 01:50:59 +0000

@llamastorm — true, but then, current technology has given us that perspective. It’s given us a sense of scale. So we see Frogger in that light now — and, as it happens, if you want to code Frogger, it *is* easier than it used to be. I think a lot of kids today would take you up on that challenge.

By: llamastorm

llamastorm — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 01:44:21 +0000

Nothing that cool or that dated, but qbasic’s really limited PLAY and SOUND support was fun to do background music and sound effects with. I think kids suffer today because current technology tends to make experimentation like that less accessible (yeah, I know, processing, something something) and all the 3D games people are used to are already flashy out of the box. You don’t get the feel of “You know, I could make a better frogger”.

By: Keith Handy

Keith Handy — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 22:32:06 +0000

Well, judging by the first few comments, the question at the beginning is not rhetorical (or if it is, at least I’ll blend in with my fellow narcissists).

Early 1980s, late middle school or early high school, Commodore 64, writing sequences in raw BASIC, using a relatively simple FOR NEXT loop and line after line of DATA statements for the pitch info. I wish I’d saved the results, especially considering everything else I’ve saved.