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Fractal Music

Temporally self-similar music and sound
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By utilizing the lack of distinction between that which comprises rhythm and tonality, a composition can remain in the same in tempo and pitch whether the tempo or pitch is halved or doubled.

There is a pyramid in the Yucatan with tuned steps. If you clap in front of it, you hear a note, as all the echoes of your clap return to you at slightly different times. Suppose there were three sets of steps. One with double and one with half the number of steps. The one with half the number of steps would return your clap as a rapid succession of claps with no intelligible note. The one with double the number of steps would return a note an octave higher than the original. You would hear all three at once. Now if you recorded this, you could listen to it at half the speed, the slow clap would be slower, an the high octave would be gone, but you would still be hearing the equivalent of the original staircase and the halved one. Thus, the "song" will have remained mostly unchanged despite the recording being played back at half the speed. The same would be true if you doubled the playback speed.

The point is not the idle curiosity of being able to play it back at different speeds and hear the same thing, but rather, to harmonize rhythm and tonality with regard to one another.

fishboner, Dec 24 2013

Folke Rabe: Was?? http://www.sonoloco.../rabe/what/was.html
was re-released with two versions: one at normal speed and one at half speed. The music was not fractal - the slower version is v different, but it seems vaguely apropos [calum, Dec 24 2013]

Fractal Tune Smithy http://robertinvent...unesmithy/music.htm
Fractal music generator [spidermother, Dec 24 2013]


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Annotation:







       Spider mother, I havent looked into other fractal music, but my sense is that the term usually refers to applying fractal functions to chord progression development and melodic development such that over the course of the composition they will take on variously noticeable fractal properties. Is that right?   

       Bigsleep, I once chose an eight bit triangle wave as my sound and my melodic structure as well as my key modulation. The result was a scale of minor thirds which would periodically change key by a minor third. It was very predictable, and pleasant but, yes, increasing by octaves in an attempt to melt the scale into a tone yielded a metallic sound akin to a chainsaw cutting through a sheet of corrugated steel with bottle caps loosely nailed to the surface. While not altogether pleasant, I did get a tone out of it.   

       Spidermother once tried to explain why this happens, but I don't remember.
fishboner, Dec 28 2013
  


 

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