For this meme remix assignment I focused on the music genre of V A P O R W A V E. Below is a quick background on the genre and why it’s a meme.

Vaporwave is an offshoot of Downtempo that similar to LoFi. While it also uses low-fidelity sampling, Vaporwave takes a more surreal-future-nostalgia approach. The genre was defined by the artist “Vektroid“, who released an album “Floral Shoppe” in 2011 under the one-time alias of “Macintosh Plus”. One song in that album, “
リサフランク420 / 現代のコンピュー” (“Lisa Frank 420/Modern Computing,” ) over time became the definition of Vaporwave. There’s actually a cool article on this here. The song itself is primarily a slowed-down version of Diana Ross’s “It’s Your Move” from 1984. Because of copyright claims, the whole Floral Shoppe is no longer available for download.
Please check out Vektroid cause she still makes music and it’s rad!

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In my piece I tried capturing the aesthetic of Vaporwave using an old TV in a blank room. As a challenge, I decided to only use Diana Ross’s original song, and have the user Vaporwave-ify the song themselves.
Initially the song plays normally with a looping clip of people dancing. Once the user move the left joy sticks the playback speed of the song and dancing clip are slowed to the same rate used by Vektroid, and some meme-relevant material is revealed on screen. The right stick controls the TV static effect. By mapping some of the A B X Y Buttons to different points in the song, I tried to recreate Vektroid’s re-sampling live.

I was planning to add more to this project, however at this point I was getting a lot of lag with the video playback, looping, and response time. When I added an extra image with effects, it nearly froze on me 🙁
The “loadram” option in the video sub-patch did not help much, did anyone have similar performance issues?