My bro’, elad, who’s been into music for some time now, came up with the idea of harvesting sound out of Fractals. He was amazed with the vast richness fractals provided visually, and was sure we could get some interesting results from trying to translate these into the audio world.

Well, he was sorta right, 2 hours and 20 lines of Python later… we got some crazy results.

What we did was generate a Mandelbrot, and simply use the values of the Mandelbrot function as the MIDI notes. We spaced all the notes evenly for now.

Now when you generate music, you need to choose some path in the mandelbrot (or in any other 2D surface, that’s because music moves in 1D for now). We tried straight lines, but got lots of monotonous areas, that’s because the Mandelbrot is filled with them. Following my bro’s suggestion we moved to a spiral (he’s hot for spirals too). We chose an area of the fractal that looks like a sun, with spikes comming out, and we simply spiralled out of it, now this gave some cool effects.

Here’s what the spiral looks like:

Here are some results:

psychadelic fall.mid

2.mid

elad.mid

1.mp3 (mixed by my bro’)

Here’s the Python source-code (requiures PIL and python-midi)

Since we like this idea, we’re gonna have a few more sessions over it, here are some future thoughts: * spacing notes unevenly. * determining cut-offs. * analyzing the data we get, calculate deriviate, and move the whole thing faster when the funcntion moves slower in an attempt to get things more evened out. * usng other functions/images. * use the mandelbrot data to determine infor other than notes, perhaps cut-offs, distance between notes and length of notes.

Gots ideas ? bring em on1, bring em on 2