Golden Ratio Cello Tune - Tune Smithy Fractal Tune

see http://tunesmithy.com for Tune Smithy, the program used to make this. longer audio clip: http://bouncemetronome.com/fractal-tu.... and page of videos here: http://www.bouncemetronome.com/video-...

This is one of the fractal tunes that come with the program.

Tuning: is Werckmeister III well temperament (from Bach's time)

Instruments: orchestral harp, viola, cello and percussion

FIBONACCI RHYTHMS

This type of rhythm is an idea of David Canright's, instead of using fixed measure sizes, you take a pattern of beats, in this case L S for large and small. Then replace the L by L S and the S by L to get L S, L, repeat the process to get L S, L, L S and so on - that's the basic idea and it so happens that pattern of beats is the same as the pattern of wide and narrow rhombs along one of the rows of a Penrose tiling. Anyway it turns out if you do that, you get a fractal like structured rhythm which is highly patterned but with no repeating measure at any time scale.

This tune uses that idea for the measure sizes, though it's obscured a bit in this particular tune because there's some other stuff going on also transforming the rhythm. But that's the structure behind the fibonacci tunes. More about it here http://bouncemetronome.com/blog/20110... and here http://robertinventor.com/software/fr...

FRACTAL TUNES

This tune is generated from the short seed phrase you hear at the start of the clip by a construction similar to the Koch snowflake visual fractal, entirely algorithmically.

No composition methods or techniques are used except to create the seed. The underlying structure is a sloth canon with structure at ever larger and larger time scales and goes on endlessly, though transformed so much you can't expect to hear it as a sloth canon.

The process of fractal "composition" consists of creating the seed, then you set how the notes are tuned, vary some parameters, and choose the instruments to play each part. The rest is all automatic. The reason it works may be because many natural sounds like running water have fractal qualities, and also composers and improvisers naturally use fractal type approacheswithout realising it.

Gives an idea of what the tune sounds like played on high quality instruments

It's a display only, non editable score, notes positioned by time, which is why the measures keep changing in size because of the fractal rhythms, with many of the fractal rhythms you couldn't notate them at all exactly with conventional musical rhythm notations.