Blowing memory on fractals...

Instead of listening to a selected item, you may copy and paste parts of it. For instance, select the whole item shown on Fig.16, type cmd-c or select "Copy" in the "Edit" menu, then select the first occurrence of 'a' and type cmd-v or select "Paste". In this way, you replace 'a' with the whole item "b b <<f>> {5, a c b, f - f} ...". The resulting performance is the following:



Fig.20 A "fractal" musical item

You can hear (and see) that the overall duration of the item is unchanged although it has become more complex. Now, time units (for the desired accuracy) have become so small that streaks appear as a grey background. Fractal fanatics may repeat the operation several times or figure out a self-imbedding grammar doing it automatically. Indeed, you'll end up blowing the computer's memory, so be careful to save windows before producing items and try to set a computation limit using dynamic weights (§4.6 of reference manual), flags in programmed grammars (§11 infra) or limited buffer size (§4.7 infra). Quantization (see §6 of reference manual) is also strongly recommended in this context.

You can type cmd-p while a string containing terminal symbols and variables is selected in any window. For instance, bring to front the alphabet window and listen to sound-objects 'a', 'b', 'c', etc., separately. Then bring the grammar window to front and select any string containing terminal symbols. If variables are found, the selection is taken as a start string in production mode.