This isn’t a fractal, but I think it does re-create the appearance quite well.

The video quality isn’t even close to the live render quality, but it gives you a good idea of it.

The screen recording here has taken the mic input and used it for the animation. The song used in this recording is “August (Reggae Rework)” by el-B from http://ccmixter.org/files/elB/16075 under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial 3.0 License.

You can download the Quartz file here, note though that while this will open in Tiger, it will not render correctly, OS X 10.5 Leopard is required for it to run correctly.

It should also be noted that the video above was rendered on a Macbook Pro with an Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4ghz with 2gb of RAM and an 8600m GT and it averages 5 frames per second, so to really experience the full potential of this, it needs to run on a Mac with a fairly powerful video card like a Mac Pro, the iMac’s and new Macbook Pro’s should also render it quite nicely.

The reason it is so intensive is because there are a number of iterator and replicate in space patches along with LFO’s and interpolator’s that are affected by both the audio volume peak and the audio spectrum, so depending on the volume and the type of music, the visualisation develops more variation.

If you look at my Deviant Art account at all, you’ll notice that it is absolutely full of fractal stills. I also had some big A1 and A2 fractal prints on exhibition, as well as an animation, at a recent inter-university festival between QUT and UQ. So I can easily say that fractals are definitely where my love in art is at. Since I first began experimenting with fractals, there has been one particularly big influence in my work, and that has been the work of Scott Draves aka Spot.

Spot’s work has been of interest to me basically since I began working with fractals and it continues to do so.

He has done a lot of work in fractals and started the Flam3, Electric Sheep and Dreams in High Fidelity projects, all of which are quite influential on my work, both in fractals and in other computational arts.

Not all of his work has been focused on fractals, but many of his idea’s share similarities with them. One example of this are his Dub Visuals which take chaotic still images and morph them, to form other still images in a flow similar to that of the evolution of his fractal animations.

I have previously done fractal animations where they are synced with music, both music performed by another artist and music that I have composed myself. However, this hasn’t been done in real time and has been a long process to setup each portion of the animation and sync it up with the music. Ultimately, I would love to develop a way of rendering fractals, even low quality or low resolution fractals in real-time based on audio input. Basically this would be combining the work I have done previously with the basic concepts of what I did for KKB210 where I did a series of lines and boxes that responded to audio input. The lines one was probably getting close, though ultimately no where near as detailed as I would like it to be, and definitely nowhere near as chaotic and fractal-like as I want.

That is my aim though and hopefully I will get to it sooner or later.