[net.music] Fractals and music

jeffw@tekmdp.UUCP (06/13/83)

     Damn right it would be interesting if some composer, electronic
or not, did something with fractals. It would be so interesting that
composers have been doing it for hundreds of years, although they never
knew the word. The greatest works of music from the past, especially from
the Classical period (about 1750-1830) are structures that show about the
same detail on several different levels, that is, at several different
time scales. And details on one level often mimic those on another level.
This is just another way of saying that the works have a fractal character.
     On a different front, there was an article in Science News awhile
back on melodies generated by a computer according to profiles given by
different kinds of noise waveforms. The melodies found to be most "musical",
as judged by several listeners, were those based on 1/f noise. These
melodies had strong fractal characteristics. And all of music once was
melodies - plainchant, for example, being the source of modern Western
music.
     None of this should be much of a surprise. Music is a direct,
creative expression of humans, who are excellent imitators. And humans
are (or at least originally were) surrounded by nature, which is even more
fractal than music. It's hardly unlikely that some of that fractalism (?)
would have rubbed off onto it. 
     Where does that leave Eno? I dunno - he can do whatever he damn
pleases. But I hope he doesn't think he's discovered something new.
     
                                         - Jeff Winslow

dce@tekecs.UUCP (06/14/83)

Eno is really messed up these days. I haven't liked anything that
he has done since "Before and After Science". He even had the
nerve to copyright the idea of adding a third speaker to a
stereo to get a reverb effect; an idea that I heard of a long
time ago and used when I was 16 (1976).

It seems to me that the things that Eno does are not new ideas,
just well-packaged old ideas that haven't been commercialized.

			David

thomas@utah-gr.UUCP (06/15/83)

I didn't think Eno was saying that "fractal music" was anything new, just
that electronic music *wasn't*.

=Spencer