Mod (subculture)

Mod is a subculture that began in 1960s Britain and spread, in varying degrees, to other countries and continues today on a smaller scale. Focused on music and fashion, the subculture has its roots in a small group of London-based stylish young men in the late 1950s who were termed modernists because they listened to modern jazz, although the subculture expanded to include women.

Significant elements of the mod subculture include fashion (often tailor-made suits); music (including soul, ska, and R&B); and motor scooters (usually Lambretta or Vespa). The original mod scene was associated with amphetamine-fuelled all-night dancing at clubs.

In England during the early to mid 1960s, mods often engaged in brawls with rockers, which led to many news articles. The mods and rockers conflict led sociologist Stanley Cohen to coin the term moral panic in his study about the two youth subcultures, which examined media coverage of the mod and rocker riots in the 1960s. In the mid-to-late 1960s, the conflicts between mods and rockers subsided, as several rock bands, including The Who and the Small Faces adopted a mod style. London became synonymous with fashion, music, and pop culture in these years, a period often referred to as "Swinging London." In turn, mod influence spread to the United States and around the world.

Module file

Module files (MOD music, tracker music) are a family of music file formats originating from the MOD file format on Amiga systems used in the late 1980s. Those who produce these files (using the software called trackers) and listen to them, form the worldwide MOD scene, a part of the demoscene subculture. Module files are often chiptunes.

The mass interchange of "MOD music" or "tracker music" (music stored in module files created with trackers) evolves from early FIDO networks. Many websites host large numbers of these files, the most comprehensive of them being the Mod Archive.

Nowadays most module files, including ones in zipped form, are supported by most popular media players such as Winamp, VLC, Foobar2000, Amarok, Exaile and many others (mainly due to inclusion of common playback libraries such as libmodplug for gstreamer).

Structure

Module files store several "patterns" or "pages" of music data in a form similar to that of a spreadsheet. These patterns contain note numbers, instrument numbers, and controller messages. The number of notes that can be played simultaneously depends on how many "tracks" there are per pattern. They also contain digitally recorded samples as well as coding for sequencing the samples in playback. The programs that are used to create these files provide composers with the means to control and manipulate sound samples in almost limitless ways to produce music.