Press release

You can use Tune Smithy to make musical fractals. These are a musical version of those renowned visual fractals, often used to make fractal landscapes with trees, mountains, clouds and so on with details within details. Composed music similarly often has a feeling of structure at many time scales - and natural sounds also. So this may be why the musical fractals sound so satisfying.

Choose one of the tunes that come with the program or enter a very short musical phrase of a few notes, and hear it transformed into an intricate tracery of music. The music is highly structured on many layers - but natural sounding too, like bird song, or the sound of the wind.

The original musical fractals of Tune Smithy are Sloth Canons - the same tune played at several speeds simultaneously. The simplest examples of this to hear are the 3, 5 and 4 beat fractal tune examples in the Sloth Canons folder. Play the 4 beat fractal tune four times slower or faster and it sounds exactly the same - except that you lose some of the finer detail when you play it at the slower tempi. This combined with the other feature, that any phrase you hear will get played again many times as the tune continues, makes it a musical equivalent of a visual fractal such as the Koch snowflake.

All this is done for you automatically. You can enter a phrase as the seed for a new sloth canon and the entire canon is constructed for you. Or you can take one of the existing tunes and adjust the seed. Then change the instrumentation as you like, and vary the other parameters to make your new tunes. Or the lazy way, use the handy Randomize button to make a new tune - until you find one you like.

When you get more into the details of how it works, there are many ways you can transform the tune. These include chord progressions, permute, rotate or invert the seed phrase as the tune continues, use of polyrhythms, and if you want to do it in fine detail you can also script any of the effects to switch on or off or vary the parameters at particular times in the fractal tune.

Tune Smithy is also much in demand for its support of the whole gamut of possible tuning systems. These include historical tunings from medieval times and later (Pythagorean, Meantone, Well temperings etc), gamelan tunings, tunings for Indian music, tunings for African music, Japanese, Arabic music and so on. Any tuning is possible; no need to restrict your creativity to the equal tempered twelve tone system or even tunings that repeat at an octave. The SCALA archive has over 3000 scales.

Other features include the rhythm player which can play complex polyrhythms and long bars (your unlock key also unlocks Bounce Metronome Pro), the chord progression player, a scale construction task for those interested in microtonal scale construction, and tasks for the harmonious Lambdoma matrix of pitches.

For more details and to download the program: http://www.robertinventor.com/software/tunesmithy/music.htm