Attractor music?

[heneganj]

This is a quirky page.  Music is generated by the position of dots rotating around a central point.

http://www.coverpop.com/whitney/index.php?var=v0

[Sockratease]

I have been looking for a decent freeware program that does this.

Any tips?

The one I found a while ago was klunky and hard to figure out.

I gave up on it...

Gotta try again!

[zeldabob888]

Ohhhh that is like the coolest thing I have ever seen *mesmerized* O..O

[alan2here]

Thanks for the link, that is great.

The title of this thread implies music made with strange attractors, I think they would create great sound's

e.g

v1 = some number
v2 = some other number
v3 = some 3rd number
n = v3
loop start
n = sin(n + v1) * v2
loop end

The result n will create the first, second, third etc... value's of a waveform which could then be played.
The sould produced would depend on the value's of v1, v2 and v3

Any programmers experanced in sound's amoung us?

[Nahee_Enterprises]

Alan Tenet "alan2here" wrote:
>
>    Any programmers experanced in sound's amoung us?

Does having any of the following meet your criteria:

• 31 years programming
• engineering degree
• can read music
• 6 years in a band
• can play multiple instruments
• very good hearing

[alan2here]

Well, all the infomation is there in my last thread about how to get a simple yet chaotic strange 1 dimentional strange attractor to work that will output a series of numbers that could be used to create a waveform.

Whats more you can play about with the imput parameters to get difrent results.

If you have tried all of that it could be branced out to lets say use the fluctuating output number to create a sin wave of fluctuating freqency over time instead of using the output directly as a waveform, or any other combination.

If you think you can code it please feal free to try, It should be quite simple if you know how to code to output sound or into a sound file.

Please stay away from MIDI, It the enemy, for some things it is good however it has been done to meany times before to create fractal music and will always sound awfull.

[JackOfTraDeZ]

that is totally freakin' AWESOME!





My humble efforts cant hold a candle to that, but if you want to hear the Lorenz or Rossler orbits 2 little DOS programs on this page
(DOS cause I aint figured out how to do sound in WinDoZe yet)


http://www.fractal-animation.net/progz/filez.html


.

[MattSchultz]

Please stay away from MIDI, It the enemy, for some things it is good however it has been done to meany times before to create fractal music and will always sound awfull.

Midi is not a musical file, it is a list of notes, and, in the same way that a conductor's score does not encompass the greatness of an orchestral performance, neither does a MIDI file encompass the sound within. The key to MIDI is to render it with the appropriate tool. Most users think of their default midi sample engine, provided my Microsoft, called the "Microsoft GSM Wavetable", which, as you indicated, produces absolutely horrible noise. But, MIDI, when rendered with a real sampler (of which their are many, but the key is that they are actually created by recording professional, orchestral musicians) actually sounds excellent. Good enough, in fact, that some modern movie scores are actually rendered in this fashion (often using the Vienna Symphonic library, which is something like $7000).

I have several libraries of samplers, including Proteus, Reason, and Mark of The Unicorn Symphonic Instrument. Feel free to send me any MIDI files you wish, and I will render them for you and send back MP3's.

I also know quite a bit about programming, and if you all can help me with your definitions of strange attractors (I remember alan2here's formula from DeviantArt, but I don't fully understand how it works - I only know the very basics of fractal math), I can help you with generation, as I have done lots of cool MIDI stuff, mostly to solve problems I've had with midi gear.

// Matt

ps- Doing sound in windoze is done through an API Called (unoriginality) DirectSound. Generally you create a stream and feed the stream to get sound to play. I don't know the specifics, as I've never done it, but that's how it is done. There is also MME, which is outdated, and AISO, which rocks everything, but is super complex. Also, there is OpelAL, which works, but, like all OpenXX APIs, sucks on Windows.

[pnorthover]

Hi Matt,

Yes, MIDI has its uses.  It was actually doing very well before MP3 (and P2P) became popular.  There were some excellent cover MIDI musicians, eg. D.W.Barnes did some great Beatles songs.  Almost every popular song had a MIDI cover available somewhere on the internet.  An advantage was you could load the MIDI file into a notation editor, tell it to play, and then see all the notes on all the tracks highlighted at the current position while you listened.  Good way to learn how to read music, or brush up your sightreading if you already knew. 

I had good results with the now defunct Gravis Ultrasound MIDI instruments.  I've often thought that Microsoft should have bought up the Gravis MIDI and included it as standard with Windows, or at least as an alternative to their default.  To my ears, the Gravis sounded much better. 

As far as fractal music programs go, I think there was ArtSong, and MusiNum, which output in MIDI format.  I haven't looked in years though, so there may be more modern programs available. 

[MattSchultz]

Indeed I agree that MS should buy somebody else and can the GSM wavetable - it blows.

MIDI can be outputted as direct flat file .mid, which is one option. The other, probably cooler, option is to allow the system to output as a generator, a real-time engine. This would enable the computer with the fractal engine not only to produce files to be re-rendered, but, using a simple and cheap cable available either for SoundBlaster gameports, (who still has a gameport?) USB, or even as a virtual software program (called loopB1) to be chained to a midi synthesizer, either hardware or software, and 'played' live.

Also, while the traditional approach is to generate notes and rhythm, MIDI itself allows the control of hundreds of other parameters. MIDI allows for 16 channels, each of which can carry 128 notes, at 127 different velocities, as well as 127 different controllers (classically used for things like pedals or organ drawbars), each with 127 degrees of resolution. This would allow us to output to synthesizers on many different diverse levels besides just note-by-note dink-diddly-dink.

I envision a software environment with an interface like ultrafractal, fused with various other musical softwares from common use. Instead of layers would be staves of a conductor's score, and instead of a graphical colored image might be a colored (or not) piece of musical notation (although another tab might have a graphical version), similar to a notation editor like Finale or Sibelius. I'm thinking such a user interface would be easy to achieve using WPF's awesome and fast vector support. Also, we could use concepts from Reason's interface (mimicking hardware, specifically, as well as virtual wiring) for configuration and parameters. Most DAWs include virtual mixers, another useful option, as well as multi-track composing.

I can re-make the page you saw on the web as an application with minimal effort. The page is simply a series generator. The music is the collection of a number of series.

Each series is generated by noting the time it takes for the dot to go around the circle at a given speed, and creating a midi note every (that time) seconds. The sequence repeats when all dots return to the starting line at once. The way to compose music for this machine would be to be able to place the dots as one liked along the starting line, as well as to be able to assign them notes (the site assigns notes by distance). This would generate a user-created interval pattern of user-assigned notes.

In the same light, I could also generate animations for regular note patterns. For example, given two patterns of notes, take quarter and eight notes, the distance to the center could be determined based on the speed of travel of each dot, the tempo of the musical piece, and the formula for circumference of a circle. As long as the given notes have a repeating pattern, this would be quite simple.

Here is another interesting device:

http://pirt.asu.edu/news%20Pendulum%20Wave.asp

I have seen this live (it now resides in ASU's mini neat science museum in the base of the physics building) and it is exceedingly neat. This device would be very simple to simulate with software.