Xref: utzoo comp.music:1049 alt.fractals:218 comp.sources.wanted:11355
Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!ucsd!sdcc6!mu298ac
From: mu298ac@sdcc6.ucsd.edu (Philip Marlowe)
Newsgroups: comp.music,alt.fractals,comp.sources.wanted
Subject: Re: Fractal Music Generation (summary)
Keywords: I need help
Message-ID: <9613@sdcc6.ucsd.edu>
Date: 11 Apr 90 03:28:53 GMT
References: <562@bilver.UUCP> <1990Apr9.151958.26859@ncsuvx.ncsu.edu>
Followup-To: comp.music
Organization: University of California, San Diego
Lines: 41

In article <1990Apr9.151958.26859@ncsuvx.ncsu.edu> george@shumv1.ncsu.edu (George Browning) writes:
>In article <562@bilver.UUCP> alex@bilver.UUCP (Alex Matulich) writes:
>
>	I have an article from the book Fundamental Algorithms for
>Computer Graphics written by Richard F. Voss that talks about fractal
>music.  Voss says "One of my exciting discoveries was that almost all
>musical melodies also mimic 1/f noise."  He gives some pictures and

	This is an incredibly obvious statement to make.  Stepwise
motion is an important attribute of many tonal melodies,and 1/f
noise
generates stepwise motion.  So why can't you program 1/f noise to
produce good tonal melodies?  Because tonal melody is not random; it
has very strong directionality, and any programmer who wants to
have an algorithm that would produce good tonal melodies has to take
goal-oriented motion into account, which I don't believe is possible
with fractals.  Traditional tonal melody is incredibly causal.  It
can not be modeled on random procedures.  If there is any way for
computers to write good, catchy, tonal melodies, I suspect it must
be through an alogrithm which is contructed on the rules that most
musicians learn in theory class for writing melodies (too much
stepwise motion in the same directionis boring; an upward leap is
usually followed by a downward resolution by step, unless it's
outlining a triad; etc.)  

	If you really want some insight into how tonal melody works,
and why good melodies *sound* good, try reading Leonard Meyer's
_Emotion_and_Meaning_in_Music_ and _Explaining_Music_.

	Previous discussions in this group about fugues being
"self-similar" shows a lack of understanding about just what a fugue
is.  Just because something is repeated at the same level, it doesn't
imply self-similarity (or does it?)  If you examine a Bach fugue at
the middleground or background level, you will see absolutely no
replication of the subject or countersubject, say.  What is
self-similar, perhaps, on these levels will be the movement from
tonic to dominant to tonic, but even this isn't guaranteed, and
besides, it's a self-similarity shared by just about every other
piece of baroque and classical music, as Schenker would have us
believe.  I really don't think you can call thematic unity
self-similarity.