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.

[1] http://artscene.textfiles.com/ansimusic/

[2] https://bbs.retropc.se/smmansi/00index.html

"Which decade was best, and why was it the 80s"

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 ...

Bauhaus - Third Uncle (1982)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sILbx5xbwPY

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.

This seems very cool but the only video is a really slow paced 30-minute screencast.

Is there a short demo?

I like it! Not only the project which looks great, but also the relaxed presentation including factually correct statements about the 80s.

Cool project. I really enjoyed the screencast- you sold me on giving it a whirl.