I’ve taken the idea of binary fractals for audio, and generalized the system to accept floating point numbers.
In essence, you give the program a wavetable “seed” which is subdivided — each sample is replaced by a copy of the wavetable, multiplied by the old sample value. This subdivision recurses until the desired length audio buffer has been generated. The initial value always begins at “1″. For a seed of “1 0.5 1″, you get the following as the first three steps:
1 -> 1 0.5 1 -> 1 0.5 1 0.5 0.25 0.5 1 0.5 1 -> 1 0.5 1 0.5 0.25 0.5 1 0.5 1 0.5 0.25 0.5 0.25 0.125 0.25 0.5 0.25 0.5 1 0.5 1 0.5 0.25 0.5 1 0.5 1
As you can imagine, you get some pretty complicated waveforms quickly.
Since these are fractals, the timbre, rhythm, and structure of the loops are all self-similar — as explained in Terran Olson’s awesome article that inspired my work on this.
Here’s a quick song I threw together in Ableton Live using only unedited, un-effected loops straight out of the program:
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Have you ever experimented with ambient sounds(subways,forest/etc.)and found any recognizable patterns pertaining to the golden ratio? Lets say you isolated the sound of people talking in the background of a subway,and dubbed out the train itself,then recorded the sound of animals(birds and such)and dubbed out the wind and all sounds associated with it(trees that sway,leaves that rustle and so forth)and then overlapped the two…or is this not that kind of website,if so i apologise.