Experiments in combining the Tune Smtihy fractal tunes with 3D Mandelbulb fractals. The original videos are by Torsten Stier and Don Whittaker, all released under the CC share alike license. List of all the separate videos here: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjdDsipyFoLUGZ-9QGdsn2P-eWagKa4u-&feature;=view_all ABOUT THE MUSIC: Tune Smithy auto generate the music, from a short seed phrase, usually just three or four notes or so, can be a bit longer. The result is self similar in a musical way, as it is based on a sloth canon, so a musical analogue of the visual fractals. In actual use it is much like the way you create a visual fractal, you can choose from presets - and you vary the parameters, and it also has a "Randomize" button which you can keep pressing until you get a tune that you like for the simplest way of all to use it. Or you can enter a musical seed as numbers, or play it in as a melodic phrase, and use that as the basis for the tune. WHERE TO GET TUNE SMITHY You can get Tune Smithy from http://tunesmithy.co.uk To find out about the fractal tunes see: http://robertinventor.com/software/tunesmithy/tune_smithying.htm More fractal tune videos here: http://robertinventor.com/software/tunesmithy/tune_smithy_videos.htm PERMISSIONS FOR THE MUSIC You can use any of the demo tunes (such as this one) that come with the program for your own work including commercially, and you can also use Tune Smithy to create new fractal music of your own. You don't need to be a composer or to have musical training to use the software, just vary the parameters to create new tunes much like the way you work with visual fractals: http://robertinventor.com/software/main/acceptable_use.htm MORE ABOUT THE TUNES All the music uses the idea of a musical seed, and it is just a case of whether you use one of the pre-existing "seeds" or randomized seeds, or you create one yourself. It then creates an endless "sloth canon number sequence" from your seed phrase and uses that to construct the tune. A sloth canon is a canon where each part plays the same tune (like a normal canon like Frere Jacques) except, each part plays it slower than the previous part so first part might play it at normal speed, second part at a third of the speed, third part at a ninth of the speed and so on. Just discovered recently that a closely related technique was used long ago by the Danish composer Per Nørgård Gone into the maths of it a bit here: http://robertinventor.com/ftswiki/Self_Similar_Sloth_Canon_Number_Sequences The sloth canon structure makes the music self similar, in a way closely related to visual fractals. If you play the tune say 3 times faster or 3 times slower then you get exactly the same melody line and the whole tune may sound similar. Except - just as for visual fractals, the similarity may not be an exact one as I transform it in various ways, sometimes so much that it completely obscures the basic canon structure to a human listener, yet somehow the whole thing coheres. The interesting thing is that it makes almost no use at all of standard composing techniques. That the tunes work and sound musical must be due to some deeper connection between fractals and music because if you were to analyse it then you would find it isn't really structured much like a conventional composition at all - and yet can sound very similar to human ears to a conventional composition. And - there are many connections between musical composition and fractals, seems musical composition is naturally fractal in some ways.

• published: 10 Feb 2013
• views: 32260