Fractals and music

You can read a article here: http://emusician.com/mag/emusic_fractals_music/

Can someone tell me more about fractals in music? Wich composers used it?

Check out a composer named Jonathan Dawe - has been applying the mathematicsd of fractals to composition.

I'm writing a piece with fractal structures in it, but I get stuck in deciding how I could actually apply the math, or if I should just apply more abstract terms like self-similarity, etc.

Write about a burning ship. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_Ship_fractal

Remember not all fractal exact or quasi similar, there exist statistical fractals.

Looks like one has to review quite a bit of calculus and foundations of analysis to use them.

Looks like one has to review quite a bit of calculus and foundations of analysis to use them.

Not really, you can use the basic ideas without understanding any of the math too. The problem is just how you want to translate it into music. Even if you use the actual math, it has nothing to do with music so you need to start making interpretative decisions which at the end could lead to results indistinguishable from not having used the math at all.

It's the same thing as representing a building in music: it doesn't necessarily mean you need to have the floor plans or know anything about architecture. It's an interpretative thing, you could do it in a thousand different ways.

I know of one program that seems pretty neat called "fractal tune smithy" though I've never tried it. It looks like when you manipulate the parameters it does most of the composing, and it can also do microtonal for nonwestern fractal stuff too. There are some examples on this page:

http://robertinventor.com/software/tunesmithy/music.htm

John M

I have a friend who is doing his whole Master's thesis on fractals and computer music. The applications of the fractal can be used in a crazy variety of ways, for instance, my friend has written pieces using the fractal as the basis of the form for the piece, as the pitch content, and even once for the dynamic content in the piece. I don't know if I'd actually do fractal music though. I think sometimes I think you can get in a bind with to much repetition, obviously, because that's what a fractal does.