Software

This was the first fractal music software I discovered, and it's still my favourite. What makes it so? A well-designed UI, the ability to make changes in real time and hear them applied to the music, user-defined scales and all-round user-friendliness. What's more, it's freeware.

No, I've no idea what that icon above represents either. This one is an oddity. Omar's Fractal uses bifurcation fractals to create extraordinarily listenable music. Everything can be tweaked in real time. Nicely, you can also change the way the piece modulates. However, most infuriating, although you can save the settings, you cannot save the Midi files created this way. Very annoying. Omar's Fractal is "Mealware" - if you like it, send the cost of a cheap meal to its creator.

Technically, this doesn't generate fractal music per se, but from a set of sixteen seeds which the user can alter. The composition is broken into sixteen parts, one seed for each, with the ability to modulate each part away from a common root. Each piece can be played in one of a good collection of scales. Certainly worth playing with.

This is a fantastic piece of software, and I urge everyone to try it. Up to 16 tracks, each playing in your scale of choice, each potentially with a different algorithm. Not only that, but you can create control sets whereby you can change any of the parameters for any of the tracks at any point! You can have voices enter and leave the composition, change scales partway through, make panning alterations and more. This has to be the most flexible of all the programs listed here. I have a few problems with the UI, and I'd like to be able to hear the results of alterations in real time, but apart from that this has my highest recommendation.

Now this really is an oddity. Mandelbrot32 creates music from portions of the Mandelbrot set and has the most baffling interface I have ever encountered - it's not just hard mathematics, but the buttons and controls are staggeringly illogical. However, the music it produces is fascinating. Best of all is the library of temperaments it uses - everything from just intonation, through raga and other non-classical scales, to Harry Partch's division of the octave in 43 parts. Fascinating.

Lots of variety in fractal types here, and excellent visualisation functions. Vectors can be derived not only from the available fractals, but also trigonometric functions and a variety of raw data types. These are then applied to pitch, duration, tempo and the entrance and exit of voices. All of these can further be transformed in a number of ways. This program gains brownie points by including Lindenmayer trees which can produce excellent results. Registration cost is US$25, which may deter a few users.

Whereas this is Lindenmayer L-system heaven! Don't be put off by the fact that it's a DOS program - it's well-presented, and as it was compiled with DJGPP, extraordinarily fast. If you're not familiar with L-systems, think of them as being like programs written in Logo, the turtle & pen language. Can't recommend this highly enough - it's real ear & eye candy with hard sums. If you're stuck for inspiration you can even randomly mutate your rule system, which can produce startling new results. Click on the pretty picture and download yourself a copy now!

Definitely the thing for uncompromisingly difficult music! QFC is currently up to version 1.8, which is a huge improvement on previous releases. Like Oblivion, it uses seeds to generate its compositions, and there are a wide variety of parameters that can then be tweaked to get it sounding just right. The internal workings of the program remain rather mysterious, but it can be very rewarding. Warning: some pieces can take quite a long time to generate, even on a fast PC.

Nothing to do with Fractals, this one. MPM generates (very long) midi files from sequences of prime numbers. All parameters are stored in a separate .ini file; this must be edited to change orchestration, tempo, or to effect the rules used to generate the music. Interesting, but maybe a little too much like hard work.