Fractal Harmonies   I was looking for an easy to use music generation program to add some sound to this web site, when I came across Fractal Harmonies. And as soon as I had downloaded and installed this program, I got hooked! Without requiring a lot of musical knowledge from its user, Fractal Harmonies generates a wide variety of interesting melodies. To do this it uses cross sections through the Mandelbrot fractal or the Julia set as a starting point. Usually it takes  some trial and error before you have found the particular effect that you are looking for, because the program does not have many variables that can be varied. And sometimes you just end up with a completely different piece of music than you had in mind. But at the same time it is that small number of variables that makes the program so easy to use. Unfortunately the program has no help file. Although it is not difficult to work out what the various parameters do, a page with explanation about the melodizer module would have been useful. And alas ... that same melodizer does not have an option to save its current state, so your composition has to be first time right! Browse around this web site to hear some examples of the music that Fractal Harmonies produces. I used the program to generate all of the background melodies. Unfortunately the Fractal Harmonies web site no longer exists, but Jason Montojo, one of the program's authors, has a copy available for download here (size: 13 MB). It is freeware, so just have a go at it and see if you like the program as much as I do. Installation instructions: Unzip the downloaded file fh.zip, which creates a directory Fractal Harmonies. Execute the setup.exe program in this directory. After installation you can delete file fh.zip and directory Fractal Harmonies. The downloaded file does not include documentation, which can be found here. Unzipping this file (fhdoc.zip) creates a directory Manual containing the file tutorial.html. Beware, the program is calculation intensive. On a slow computer the created MIDI files will play significantly faster than the music while it is being generated.

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