This is Addiplication

Hello everyone, and welcome to yet another seccond-rate web site.



My name is Zeb Schweickert. Perhaps you have heard of me. (not likely)
I am not a musician. I like music, but what really gets me going is math.
In particular I like the kind of math whose applications to the "real world" are philisophical in nature.
Over a year ago (spring 2004) I was thinking about music and what makes it so damn special.
I thought about how sometimes you can hear a song for the fist time and know how it goes or how it's supposed to go.
And then it occured to me, self similarity.

Now, I had tried many times before to create music from various iterated function systems.
I tried all kinds of things, rotations, scaling, modular division, whatever seemed like a good idea at the time.
I never had any good reason to use the methods I did, it was all pretty random, and so were the results.
Of course, I have absolutely no background in music theory aside from what I have discovered on my own.
And then I had the idea of self similarity.
That's when things started to get interesting.

The idea came from the cantor set.
If you don't know what that is, there are plenty of websites explaining it in great detail.
So it's like the cantor set but instead of breaking the line into thirds and removing the middle one what I did was break the line into however many segments I want and then shifting them up or down.
This process would creae a fractal if carried out to infinity.
The ammount of shifting up or down is based on a percentage of the curent height of the line segment.
I found out pretty quick that 25, 50, and 75 percent seem to sound the best.
I also realized that frequency doubles with octaves.
I had probably heard that somewhere before but it never clicked.
I then added the option to shift up or down based on adding a percentage of the octave the note is in.
Hence the term, addiplication.
I played aroud with this for some time and found longer songs to be way to repetative.
I found it works much better to change patterns during iteration.
For instance, using the same pattern to start and end with but with a different one in between usually sounds good.



I am working on learning java so you can try it for yourself.
So far, no luck. I don't have a lot of time to work on it.
If anybody knows of any applets out there that can draw lines or play tones please tell me where to find them.

Here are some old examples I'm not sure what method was used to create each one but they are interesting none the less


If anybody has seen this process before or have done it themslves, please drop me a line at snilubez@yahoo.com

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