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Friday, February 8, 2013

Fractal music!

This comes courtesy of Jack N.:


You may (or may not, if you are on the brink of sanity) enjoy the following video whose music, by renowned algorithmic composer RenĂ©-Louis Baron (recipient of the first patent in mathematical music composition), is constructed entirely with fractal pattern employment. For those of you not following, that means every single note was chosen as part of a larger, iterated mathematical pattern translated to music. The crux of fractal music is often what is referred to as the Cantor set-a recursively-defined pattern whose elements are represented by:

Asub(n)=Asub(n-1) \ U < iterated: k approaches infinity from k=0> [(1+3k)/3^n, (2+3k)/3^n] 
or 
C=∏Asub(n) 

...obviously. I mean, Beethoven did it for his first Ecossaise. The essence of fractal music created with Cantor's pattern lies in its iterated, fractal sequences based on multiples of sixteen often in what are hierarchical, or architectonic patterns-musicologist jargon for chromatic fractal arrangement. 
While the music may sound terrible, it's sadistically thrilling to think how much time one French guy wasted in composing it using Cantor's set and what sounds like the synthesizer from Super Mario 64. 
Think while you listen. 

PS: a helpful academic perspective on fractal composition----> http://www.unc.edu/~jimlee/JohnObrienFractalMusic.htm

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