Music and Fractals

[wgscott]

I just read this: Music & Fractals | Stereophile.com

 

(It is from 1990).

 

I probably need to read it more carefully, but I think the assertion is that musical waveforms have an approximately self-similar property that isn't preserved with digital sampling.

 

Whatdayathink of that?

 

I'm skeptical, but it is an interesting idea...

[mansr]

Everybody was talking about fractals back then. A few years later they all stopped.

[mmerrill99]

All it seems to be saying is that digital audio does not display monotonicity whereas analog does. In digital audio the distortion increases as the level decreases.

[wgscott]

Everybody was talking about fractals back then. A few years later they all stopped.

 

They still are. You just need to look at it in terms of a different time-scale.

[wgscott]

All it seems to be saying is that digital audio does not display monotonicity whereas analog does. In digital audio the distortion increases as the level decreases.

 

Yeah, but you don't need to invoke some sort of self-similarity transformation.

 

Anyway, it should be something that is computationally testable, at the very least.

[mansr]

All it seems to be saying is that digital audio does not display monotonicity whereas analog does. In digital audio the distortion increases as the level decreases.

 

And that is why we have 24-bit audio.

[mmerrill99]

Yeah, but you don't need to invoke some sort of self-similarity transformation.

Anyway, it should be something that is computationally testable, at the very least.

Sure, fractals was just a sexy concept at the time of writing, shoehorned to fit

[Ralf11]

Everybody was talking about fractals back then. A few years later they all stopped.

 

Ha Ha! So true in so many fields - fractals turned out to be an interesting observation with limited predictive utility

[mansr]

Ha Ha! So true in so many fields - fractals turned out to be an interesting observation with limited predictive utility

But they're so pretty! And you can keep zooming in on the Mandelbrot set for ever! Infinite precision. Take that, 24-bit.

[mrvco]

Fractals were replaced Fibonacci Numbers.