FractMus 2000

Making music on a computer doesn’t necessarily mean you have to hook up an instrument, because there are various tools, and even a Windows built-in MIDI sound library to use in your creations. For instance, you can use those sounds with FractMus 2000 to create custom, high-quality MIDI tracks.

The application is slightly different than your average music making program, in the sense that it uses mathematical algorithms to generate sound. Don’t worry, because you don’t need a clean math attendance sheet to figure out how it actually works.

On the visual side of things, the application looks rather rough, or overwhelming, to be more precise. The center area holds all audio layers you can work with, and you’re free to add up to 16 different instruments, each with fully-customizable options, such as basic offset, octaves, note, scale, and note value.

General song options are also shown in the main window. As such, you can easily set tempo, start and end counters, as well as time signature. You can set a different math algorithm for each audio layer. These can mean morse-thue sequence, earthworm sequence, wolfram cellular automata, 3n+1 numbers, logistic map, 1/f noise, henon, hopalong, martin, gingerbreadman, lorenz, or random sequence.

All of these algorithms can be tweakd. Upon selection, you’re asked whether you want to modify values which define the algorithm. What’s more, you can initiate a visualizer to get feedback in an updating preview panel, with a graph building according to numerical values and algorithm, and audio letting you know how it sounds like.

Additional options can be used to squeeze even more out of your songs. Based on events you trigger whilst playback, a composition maker allows you to create even larger sequences of songs. With it also comes a randomizer for more variety.

To sum it up, FractMus 2000 can be used to put those math formulas you learned to good use. Sure enough, no actual math knowledge is required, because the algorithms used are already configured. As neat as this may be, the only use for generated files can be in video games, or for sound effects, with little control over sequences and sound itself.