While I've never dealth with fractals, and anything more than just tones,
I've played around with mathematical formulae back in the college days as
far as programatically generating tones within a given range.
Speaking as a math geek and a music geek, I hate to say the results were,
more often than not, pretty dull. But that's to be expected, of course.
(Again, I was just dealing with tones -- or something that would be just
one out of a gazillion tracks comprising a typical track we'd talk about
here, so take this with a micron of salt.)
The most interesting equations were ones associated with physics,
chemistry, or astronomy. Things involving rigorous mathematics (your
bell curve formulae, your quadratic formulae) were the ones that usually
didn't sound as interesting. It does really depend on *how* you use these
formulae of course, so I don't mean to dis my mathemetic bruthas and
sistas. :)
And I'm not saying any of this to discourage folks from using raw math to
make music.. In fact, I encourage it. But as long as raw math isn't the
*only* thing that involved in creating the music. It's the fine tuning,
tweaking, and subsequent human input that will make pieces like this
interesting and memorable... (again, all IMHO)
Speaking of which, my *very first* record I ever bought (for 25 cents at a
garage sale) when I was 9 years old was this astronomical data simulation
record called "Johannes Kepler's Harmony Of The Worlds". Each track
essentially combines the vibrations, tones, and beats generated by the
nine planets, using each planet's size, radius of orbit, orbit angle, etc.
as parameters to the sounds each would generate. All combined, the
results were pretty damn disturbing. Coil wished they could make bowels
churn like this record. And this is coming from a Coil fan. :)
=======================================================================
Brian MacDonald <brianm@kuci.org>
KUCI 88.9 fM in Irvine, CA -- Orange County
"Zee Robot attacked zee computer -- in zee outer space...!"
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