Fractal Tune Smithy 3.0

Fractal Tune Smithy 3.0 is designed as a professional program that can allow you to create beautiful music effortlessly  and discover your talent as a budding composer! Choose one of the tunes that come with the program or choose or play a short musical phrase of a few notes, and hear it transformed into an intricate tracery of music. The music is fractal which means it is highly structured on many layers - but natural sounding too, like bird song, or the sound of the wind.

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. Try authentic historical temperaments with tunings for keyboards from Bach or Mozarts time. Try tunings for Indonesian Gamelans, or Indian music with drones. Try modern exotic tunings such as non octave scales, or musical geometries with highly symmetrical floating chord patterns.

Explore the effects of instrumentation, in an environment where melody making is effortless. Suitable for complete newbies to composing - there is no need to be able to read music notation. Just choose one of the fractal tunes, vary the instruments, and vary the parameters to make your own new tunes.

Play directly in any of the tunings yourself with a music keyboard. Retune your own compositions to any tuning. Play melodies and chords on the PC keyboard - with the space bar as a sustain pedal, and the mouse scroll wheel as a modulation wheel :-). Play legato style (if your synth supports it) in microtonal tunings in the same way you do in twelve equal.

Play rhythms, long bars, and polyrhythms. Enter any chord progression as text and play it in any tuning. Make fibonacci rhythms which are highly structured, but never repeat exactly. A mouse theremin which can also play sliding chords. Send tunes to your friends as musical e-cards.

Built in wave shape player to play mathematically exact waves. CSound support. Much more.

The program comes with extensive help, an on-line wiki, tutorials, FAQ, example midi clips and tunes, etc.

Major Features:

1. Practice simple and compound rhythms, complex polyrhythms (several contrasting rhythms played at once such as three and four beats in the same bar), and long bars (hypermeasures)
2. Play chord progressions such as the ones you see in web sites about chords - you can copy / paste most chord progressions from other web sites directly into the player and click the play button to hear them immediately - or set a rhythm to create a backing track for practice. You can also play microtonal chords in any tuning you like or in historical temperaments
3. Explore the tune generating capabilities of Fractal Tune Smithy - create beautiful fractal music intricate as snowflakes. Compose new tunes just by varying the parameters of the example tunes. This is suitable for complete beginners to music and composition, advanced algo-comp enthusiasts - or as a source to generate new melodic ideas
4. Send a Tune Smithy musical e-card to a friend
5. Explore microtonal music - see Microtonal Explorations
6. Try out the incredible range of tunings that have been developed world wide - historical baroque tunings, Gamelan tunings, Indian music, tunings based on vertex patterns of 3D shapes, and other special ones invented by modern scale designers
7. Add microtonal capabilities to your composing software by using the retuning faculties in FTS - see Compose Microtonally
8. Play midi clips in any tuning
9. Use your mouse and p.c. keyboard as musical instruments - see Mouse & P.c. keyboard music
10. Move the mouse around to play a theremin with many advanced features (the theremin is that instrument that you play just by waving your hands in the air). You can also play the theremin using the PC keyboard to change the speed and direction of the theremin mouse cursor.
11. Find out about the use of the Lambdoma keyboard in music therapy, and play in the Lambdoma tone array using your mouse, PC keyboard or Barbara Hero's hardware Lambdoma keyboard
12. Show Lissajous patterns for the chords you play
13. Transcribe bird song or microtonal solo lines and export the transcription as a MIDI file
14. Analyse the sound of a musical instrument or chord to high pitch accuracy - useful for microtonal enthusiasts who are willing to spend some time tweaking it to get the best results
15. Use the Wave Shape Player to make audio clips of your chords directly as audio files
    
16. Explore the capabilities of CSound with ease - a music synthesis system that has until now had a reputation of being hard to use as it required programming skills. Tune Smithy's innovative automated C-Sound orchestra-builder lets you just choose the C-Sound instruments from a drop-list, much as you would with a normal midi instrument 
17. Use the new inbuilt Wave Shape Player as a source of new pure harmonic timbre type sounds. It explores some of the sounds you can make by repeating a short segment of the curve for any mathematical formulae in various ways, which is an unusual approach in this field, so may give new sounds for composers.
18. It's other speciality is that it plays frequencies with extreme precision (exact to fifteen decimal places or so). It can be a useful alternative to your sample player or soundcard when you want the notes to be particularly precisely pitched.
19. The preset instruments can just be selected from a menu. Also you can tweak the parameters - and if you have some basic maths awareness, you can also use it to make new waves yourself 
20. Do microtonal calculations with the inbuilt Calculator - just enter any sum, or formula and it will instantly calculate the result. It's strong point is that it is particularly designed for use with scale calculations involving cents, ratios etc.

Enhancements:

• Csound support - use CSound instruments just by selecting them from a drop list.
• New Wave Shape Player - plays mathematically defined shapes.
• Major overhaul in the user layout.
• Can retune multiple midi in devices simultaneously to multiple midi outs. Fractal tunes and rhythms are scriptable.

Requirements: Sound card