Thanks
. Yes, Tune Smithy auto generate the music, from a short seed phrase, usually just three or four notes or so, can be a bit longer.
In actual use it is much like 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. That's what it does anyway - just a case of whether you use one of the pre-existing "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:
Self Similar Sloth Canon Number SequencesThe 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.
Does this answer your question?
hello and welcome to the forums
can you elaborate what you mean with "fractal music" do you auto-generate the music somehow ? or do you apply fractal techniques to the creation of your patterns ?!