BiCubic
BiCubic is a passion project I am working on with a friend. The idea that we have is we would like to create immersive audio-visual experiences. My friend, Nick Burt, is a Digital Media Audio student. Beyond being a phenomenal audio engineer, he is a talented musician, capable of playing a multitude of instruments proficiently. Although I do play guitar, bass, and piano, I am by no means a great musician. My passion lies with visuals. Together we came up with the idea of incorporating both music and carefully crafted visuals into a cohesive stimulating sensory experience.
We have been working out this idea for around six months or so. While we haven’t created too much content yet, we are both honing our skills in our respective digital media fields and plan to go full-throttle with BiCubic over the Summer.
So what is BiCubic? I’ve really only described it in a vague way. Allow me to go into a little more detail about it. BiCubic is heavily inspired by the music genre known as chiptune. This genre is categorized by utilizing retro video game console sounds to create music. What we have in mind for BiCubic is to incorporate chiptune music and electric guitar, bass, and drums into hybrid chiptune/rock songs. We will then take those songs and I will create a visual experience to go along with them. We would not only like to create music videos but also perform at local venues on stage. It is possible to create different visual effects and control them live on stage with a video game controller to match the musical performance. That’s where I would come in during the live performances. Something different about chiptune music development is that you program the audio in advance. In other words you wouldn’t actually play the music on stage like you would with an instrument. While I’d be handling the visuals on stage, Nick would be enhancing the recorded songs by playing on various instruments. So that’s BiCubic in a nutshell.
As seen at the beginning of the article, I have created a rough draft of our logo. I have also had in mind an idea for an animation to go along with a song. I call it GameBoy Guy.
This is only a rough draft to test out a concept. (Edit) Since writing this article I have updated Game Boy Guy’s body as shown but I still need to refine his headphones and limbs. Along with developing a few visual concepts, both Nick and I have been learning a few audio programs for creating chiptunes. The program I have played around with a bit is LSDJ, a program designed to be run on the Nintendo Game Boy.
LSDJ is a popular program for creating chiptunes but it is a bit challenging to compose songs with because you are limited to only four channels of audio. It also requires you to have some basic computer science skills because it works with hexadecimal numbers. Luckily my programming experience has helped me tackle learning the basics of this software. I managed to recreate a song from the original Sonic the Hedgehog released for the Sega Genesis in 1991. I’m a huge gamer and Sonic was the first game I remember playing as a kid so it was pretty cool to be able to recreate some of the music from the game.
While BiCubic is still in its infancy, we have big plans for it. We think of it more as a project than a band. Once we have more content, I would like to make a website dedicated to the project. There are a lot of possibilities for creating an immersive experience on the site. I think I would need to gain a bit more technical experience but I would like to create a site similar to this one. Panoramical — I was absolutely blown away by this site and creating a similar experience is something for me to strive for.
Thank you for taking the time to read about my passion project. I’ll leave you with our first song, created by Nick Burt. I plan to add visuals to it soon.
Russell Andlauer is a student in the Digital Media program at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, studying Interaction & Design. The following article relates to extra-curricular work and is representative of the skills learned.
