Back in the day, there was an extension to ANSI control codes called ANSI Music[1]. It borrowed the musical notation from IBM-BASIC's (and GW-BASIC) 'PLAY' statement. The standalone ANSIPLAY would play them back, or with the Telimate terminal emulator it'd play in the background while you used a BBS.
The last version of ANSIPLAY[2] was 2.1 I believe.
Birth of Hip-Hop. New Wave. Electronic. Blondie. Michael Jackson's "Thriller", which echoes to this day in Justin Bieber's "Peaches". Metallica in their prime. Prince & the Revolution. Faith No More's Epic to close things out. And, of course, Rick Astley ;)
Recently heard Depeche Mode's "Black Celebration" for the first time in years and couldn't help but think it sounds better with age, better than anything today. Then a Bauhaus cover of Brian Eno's "Third Uncle" came on ...
I have a soft spot for ANSI art and secretly hope it has a reason to come back in a fresh way like pixel art has. The 1x2 blocks are just so iconic.
I fooled around making some tools to do stuff like parse a GIF of an ANSI back to ANSI and devolve a photo to (crummy) ANSI art the way some scripts do with ASCII, but it is pretty remedial compared to the code that exists for futzing with pixel art.
If you are a fan of this aesthetic and would like to visit it in audio form, it’s more “Lofi inspired” but it checks all the right boxes for me; I also recommend checking out SunVox:
The last version of ANSIPLAY[2] was 2.1 I believe.
[1] http://artscene.textfiles.com/ansimusic/
[2] https://bbs.retropc.se/smmansi/00index.html