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.