1.0 Preface

First of all we would like to say that if any reader happens to be looking for fractals, formulae or programming or even just an approximation to the fractal phenomenon in these pages, s/he will not find it*. However, what this reader will find is an explanation of a musical experience based on fractals, which is part of a wider work on the field of composition that, after a decade of search and research, can now pause for a while and reflect upon what has been achieved along these lines.

Our interest is mainly focused on the relationship between this type of objects and purely musical objects. By the latter we understand those objects that underlie the relations of musical arquitecture ( we leave aside deliberately physical-acoustic musical phenomena, though we assume that unsuspected relations may occur between these and fractals)

The shape of this work does not have any clear order or criterion: it is based upon the chronology of our own quest, upon our journeys through the world of ideas, or through the computer-programmes made in order to make feasible those very ideas and through the rapidity of computation which has been attained as Information Science has progressed.

As a student of Francisco Guerrero, Carlos Satué begins to transfer composition procedures achieved by traditional elements such as paper, pencil and electronic calculator (combinatorial analysis, first attempts with fractals and so on) to small programmes written in Basic, which turned out to be an invaluable help for carrying out his works. Some time later he meets Carlos Frías and both join in a project to design programmes to assist composition. The more Computing-Science advanced and developed, the more possibilities and new tools were laid open which had not been suspected before. To describe those tools is the goal of this text.

All images used in this work have been designed with our own programmes, except those which have been drawn from those which are freely disposable on the web.

*There is a vast number of books, video-tapes, and so on that deal with the fractal phenomenon; the Web as well offers a wide variety of information related to fractals.