My bro’, elad, who’s been into music for some time now, came up with the idea of harvesting sound out of Fractals.
He was amazed with the vast richness fractals provided visually, and was sure we could get some interesting results from trying to translate these into the audio world.
Well, he was sorta right, 2 hours and 20 lines of Python later… we got some crazy results.
What we did was generate a Mandelbrot, and simply use the values of the Mandelbrot function as the MIDI notes. We spaced all the notes evenly for now.
Now when you generate music, you need to choose some path in the mandelbrot (or in any other 2D surface, that’s because music moves in 1D for now). We tried straight lines, but got lots of monotonous areas, that’s because the Mandelbrot is filled with them.
Following my bro’s suggestion we moved to a spiral (he’s hot for spirals too). We chose an area of the fractal that looks like a sun, with spikes comming out, and we simply spiralled out of it, now this gave some cool effects.
Here’s what the spiral looks like:
Here are some results:
psychadelic fall.mid
2.mid
elad.mid
1.mp3 (mixed by my bro’)
Here’s the Python source-code (requiures PIL and python-midi)
Since we like this idea, we’re gonna have a few more sessions over it, here are some future thoughts:
* spacing notes unevenly.
* determining cut-offs.
* analyzing the data we get, calculate deriviate, and move the whole thing faster when the funcntion moves slower in an attempt to get things more evened out.
* usng other functions/images.
* use the mandelbrot data to determine infor other than notes, perhaps cut-offs, distance between notes and length of notes.
Gots ideas ? bring em on1, bring em on 2
I am so glad I discovered your blog about the fractal music. I have been thinking about the possibility of making fractal music. I saw some old show on PBS about two months ago. To be totally honest with you I am not a math guy, and I don’t understand the math end of fractals. Here’s what I was thinking. The problem with music is that we hear it linearly. There is now way to hear the entire song at once. You look at a whole picture top, bottom, etc. When I look at fractals I feel the need to see all of them. If there was a way to duplicate fractals using some sort of 3d music it would be really cool. I don’t know if this makes any sense or is any help, but I would love to hear more of your thoughts.
that’s the biggest problem,
most people who think of fracatl music use lots of hand-movements and talk about big things, sometimes finding it hard to express their exact thoughts about the subject.
although it is more or less impossible to hear hte song at once, we can try to listen to many simulatenous channels of music, all representing different paths along this fractal.
but ohad, it sounds awful.
people with Synaesthesia can actually see what they hear.
there’s a leak in the brain between the sensor’s input and the perception processing. now look at the fractal. what does it sound like ? i think it sounds similar to what you recorded. i suspect one type of stimulus has no intelligible mapping to the other.
some of them sounds odd,
some sound pretty cool,
nevertheless they are good raw-material for musicians, they can use the data in all sorts of way.
i’m working on a small interactive program which should be very fun for some, and maybe even productive for some other.
I agree with what ‘anonymous’ has to say
Hello,
Fractal Music made up with Fractmus and interpreted by Cubase and some virtual synthetizers and midi FX.
In streaming or downloading:
http://felinguellec.free.Fr
The website is in French but music is music…
(I do not speak English, this is a machine translation.)
Felinos
Here are some fractal image sonifications. Great Blog!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izne0lfYAyA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Br57CsDAFw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpJjLAaSX5I
I’m trying to work fractal music with Python, just for hobbie, but I’m new in programming tasks. In what directory must I insert the python-midi files, please? I apologize for my bad English.
@Alex: I haven’t used this code for a long time, I’m sure if you look through the python files you’ll find the reference.