I am looking to hire a deveoper. All offers and prices considered.

It is a fractal sound synthesis for the web:

http://www.odesk.com/jobs/Sound-synthesis-website-create-simple-tone-sound-file-perhaps-generated-Flash-Java-CSound-interface_~~1f24680f37d9f532

Composed using Per NørgÃ¥rd’s fractal infinity series:
a(2n) = -a(n), a(2n+1) = a(n) + 1, a(0)=0.
Every four notes in the primary voice, the modus is transposed into a neighbouring one.
It was made using Max/MSP, the Modal Objects Library by Vince Manzo and Fredrik Olofsson’s f0.noergaard external. Sonically the voices are performed by Vember Audio’s Surge. The glitch noises are from DEVSND’s Arp 2600 and Bent 808 libraries, processed by DtBlkFx, Buffer Override and Reaktor.
Tempo is 120180

http://veqtor.blogspot.com/2009/03/snowflakes.html

This is the page for the wondrous and now quite hoary Fractal Tune Smithy which I used the free version of for a very long time and bought last year (I think I got the $35 version)

“What’s a Fractal Tune?

There are many types of fractal, and one type consists of a triangle, with several smaller triangles added to each of its sides, and yet smaller triangles attached to each of those, and so on. The background of this page shows what it’s like. It’s called the Koch snowflake.

So why not use musical notes, adding smaller notes within each one, and smaller ones within those, and so on.

Or, easier in music, go the other way, and start with a small pattern and build it up to larger and larger structures.”

I also use it to re-tune multitimbral multiple-instances of VST plug-ins in microtonal .scala temperaments via MidiOx. Very, very useful and the developer is incredibly nice and very helpful. A legendary program!

So that’s another way of looking at fractals in music. And he has many a link to other projects there.

Here’s a link:

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=5&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.kvraudio.com%2Fforum%2Fprintview.php%3Ft%3D214851%26start%3D0&ei=L7eySe35Nom-MoPyiOwE&usg=AFQjCNFc68UYbT8uYtGVA0kM65b8MFnITg&sig2=ajeLl-GUBTQUzVq5SyyjGQ

to a KVR thread, down for maintainance at the moment, linking to liqih’s freeware Kaotica VST effect filter and midi chaos LFO

have fun!

I’ve posted the code, and some example .wav files on my site:
http://raintone.com/code/genfractal/

I’d love to see what other people can do with this stuff!

Provide the rules and it generates recursive fractal sound based on it.

For example, the arguments ‘1 101 000′ lead to the following sequence:

1
101
101000101
… (ie the Cantor Set)

You can provide any binary pattern you want, and it expands into a recursive fractal .wav file.

Enjoy,
-jd

I devoted one section of my thesis to applying fractal behavior to music analysis of improvised music, and it contains an overview of fractal scaling behavior. It’s online at
http://ccrma.stanford.edu/~lselden/ (pg. 21)

Other people that have used fractal analysis for music include Sebastian Streich, who uses fractal scaling behavior as a way to measure the “danceability” of songs in his thesis, and Jafari et all who analyze Bach (both cited below).

I think fractals show up in music much more often. As Ken Marsley suggests above, any music that has some heirarchical structure in which multiple levels (bar, phrase, section) share some rules or tendancies has a fractal dimension (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hausdorff_dimension).

References:

Streich, S. “Music Complexity a multi-faceted description of audio content.” 2007.

Jafari, G. R, P. Pedram, and L. Hedayatifar. “Long-range correlation and multifractality
in Bach’s Inventions pitches.” 0704.0726 (2007). 15 Dec 2008
.

Peng C-K, Hausdorff JM, and Goldberger AL. “Detrended Fluctuation Analysis (DFA).”
Fractal Mechanisms in Neural Control: Human Heartbeat and Gait Dynamics in
Health and Disease. 15 Dec 2008
.

Googling fractal music seemed to time warp straight to ‘99 on every hit.

http://cdbaby.com/cd/schachter

I’m not terribly impressed with any promise of graphics into music per se either. One is taking a space dimension, say width and saying that is equal to time. I’m not convinced that cuts it when making a claim, it’s abstracted beyond an analogy. Though one can always get attention by saying “want to hear what this image sounds like” as if that was actually happening. Images don’t intrinsically have a time dimension unless they are moving images.

On the other hand I’m all in favor of one aspect of MetaSynth. The ability to encode sound into a graphic and then manipulate it with graphic tools is great. I wish their engine was more accurate as to what goes in comes back out sounding much like it should, but still it’s a good tool.