Page 115 - 2023 eMag Final Draft

cassettes with music didn’t happen until a
Music. The world of music is vast,
and unending. In this world, there’s the
mainstream pop that most of us must have
heard of; there’s the Western electronic
dance music scene that’s associated with
pubs and music festivals; and there’s the
topic for today: the Japanese doujin (JP for
indie) music scene, that no one seems to
know.
Ever since household computation
systems (i.e. computers) surfaced on the
market, people have been trying to make
music with the power of technology, with
the first hardware based digital audio
editing system appearing in 1978. It
originally started in the Western side of
things, then the rest of the world quickly
caught up, including Japan.
Let’s go back in time for a bit to,
say, 1981. PC-8801, a personal computer
developed by Nippon Electric Company, has
just been released in Japan. People started
exploring its capabilities, which resulted
in lots of programs being developed for it,
with one of them being – you guessed it – a
digital audio editing system. Some people
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Written by Mr. Loh Jia Jun started writing music via this way and
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Il l u s t ra t io n b y L e e X ue R ui S r1S cF stored them into floppy disks or cassettes.
Illustration by Lee Xue Rui Sr1ScF
Everything is still beginning, and a larger
audience is needed; enter Comiket.
Comiket, shorthand for Comic
Market, is the largest doujin convention
in today’s Japan, with a variety of original
and fanmade goods sold there; ranging
from manga, accessories, artbooks, and of
course, music. The first Comiket happened
in 1975, but selling floppy disks and
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few years after.
Although compact discs were
invented earlier than that, the first CD
music release only appeared in the late 1990
Comiket, which marked the start of a CD
based doujin music era. More and more
people sold music at Comiket as doujin
artists from this point on, which led to the
birth of another important event: M3.
First held in 1998, Music Media-
Mix Market (M3) is a JP event focusing
on CD/DVD media, and has become the
main event for most doujin music releases.
Unlike Comiket, which is held in Tokyo
Big Sight across a span of two to four
days (number of days have been changing
in the past), M3 takes place in a smaller
convention hall and lasts for only a few
hours.
With both being bi-annual events,
these two singlehandedly support the
entire doujin music scene (although M3
is way important in terms of music), even
attracting overseas indie artists to set up
booths in the events selling their music
due to the large audience in Japan, while
additional smaller but equally important
events have also been created to add more
variety.
After all of this introduction, let’s
finally talk about the music itself. In the
beginning, as everything was still very basic,
so was the music. No effects were available
and with mainly MIDI input/output, there
were only so many instruments to choose
from. As an example, check out Chemool’s
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