Fractal musical rhythms
February 21, 2012 at 1:49 PM
One of Martin Gardner’s collections of his Mathematical Games columns from Scientific American is titled Fractal Music, Hypercards and More… The title article “White, Brown, and Fractal Music” is all about how the pitch structure of different types of music can be easily distinguished by the human ear. We know what white noise is: It’s the static we hear in between radio stations. No sound is correlated with the next one, so we get undifferentiated noise.
The other extreme is what is known as Brownian, or brown, music. It’s based on Brownian motion — random motion of small particles — where every position is only a small distance from the previous position. Brown music is simply a random walk up and down the musical scale.
via Wired
Image: Horia Varlan/Flickr/CC
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