Abstract
A parallelism of the fractal geometry of natural landscape and that of music suggests that music can be investigated through a visual representation of acoustic signals. The parallelism inspires us to make musical abstracts by scaling the original down to a half quarter or eighth of its original length. An algorithm for music reduction has been devised. The self-similarity of Bach’s music has been demonstrated by this analysis.
Bird songs, nursery rhymes and classical music are distinguished by their diatonic scale. Bird songs and nursery rhymes are not well-structured successions of tones, dominated by unison or seconds (i = 0,1,2). A proper combination of selected songs can, however, include enough variety to achieve a fractal geometry. The progress to baroque and classical composers is manifested by the approximation to fractal geometry in Bach’s and Mozart’s music, simulating the harmony of nature. This harmony is absent in modern music.
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© 1993 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Hsü, K.J. (1993). Fractal Geometry of Music: From Bird Songs to Bach. In: Crilly, A.J., Earnshaw, R.A., Jones, H. (eds) Applications of Fractals and Chaos. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-78097-4_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-78097-4_3
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