This video, via CodeParade, explores sound synthesis with fractals.
“Making music and sound effects directly from common fractals was an idea I though of one night, so I just had to try it out to see what it would be like.
The results were really interesting and actually helped me understand even more about fractals and chaos.”
Check it out and share your thoughts on this approach in the comments!
Amazing!
Very, very cool !!!
Really interesting.
As usual what looks good sounds not that great and vice versa
There is research that african drum patterns, especially the solo parts are made of fractal patterns.
Source?
“An idea I thought of one night”? Pretty sure this was done decades ago. I remember finding a few fractal music CDs in the library when I was a music undergrad and studying electronic music.
Big list of folks at the bottom of this page.
https://www.fractalmusicmachine.com/fractal-explanation/
Fractal music CDs… probably using fractal patterns for melody selection, not necessarily for sound synthesis.
Formula for feather fractal please!!!
This is pretty cool (yes, I do like it) but hardly new. Steinberg did something similar on the Atari back in the 1980’s with their Avalon sample editing and synthesis program. In that program, there was the capability of generating a waveform using “Fractal Synthesis”, which mapped an interactive portion of the Mandelbrot Set onto an X/Y grid in order to generate the harmonics for a waveform.
Of course, that fractally-generated waveform could then be routed through a configurable modular network of filters, cross-modulators, envelopes, and effects. Then end-result was meant to be saved and transferred for playback into one of the common samplers of the day, like the Emu Emax, Prophet 2xxx, or Akai S-series samplers.
Not too bad for ~1987… ;^)
Computing power these days, however, could make such generation more attractive and musical, taking into account high-iteration cycles at points close to the edge of the fractal set to take advantage of evolving iterative sounds.
That was my idea, I’m just too low self-esteem to implement it :-p
Ok, now I can add to this. What you need is an evolving sound to make it more interesting, so have a path for the synthesized waveform to follow on the fractal map. One other thing you can do is map the iterative function output such that if it’s outside the mandelbrot set, rather than have it escape to infinity, invert it so that it goes to zero, so that you can synthesize the valleys outside of the fractal set and decay to zero, using a function such as |z^2|/(|z^3| 1) from 0 -> inf.
One further note, is that the closer your starting point is to the edge of the fractal set, the more time it has to evolve until it reaches an attractive cycle, at which time it could be detected and the sound event ended.