Fractal drum machine plays any beat [video]
3 comments
·August 20, 2025jaffa2
sublinear
It's just a really inconvenient encoding scheme for an almost un-musical subset of music. Every note must be the same length and the fractal just keeps getting uglier the more symbols you want to encode.
The video does acknowledge that and other some other musical limitations, but the biggest ergonomic one was unmentioned. Similar encodings are not located near each other, and the spatial difference only gets larger for symbols earlier in the string.
That's pretty bad if you wanted to use this as an instrument. I don't believe there is any fractal encoding scheme that could fix this. It's very silly.
It may be better off as a compression scheme. A single coordinate of modest precision could probably encode a fairly long string.
JKCalhoun
Just as bad, large swaths of screen real estate are for the simplest (one or two note) sequences. The more interesting (longer) sequences get increasingly smaller in terms of "pixels".
I watched the video but i still don’t get it.