Quote Originally Posted by Evil G
a little experimentation should prove that timbre and rhythm are in fact the same thing. the only difference is that our brains process things differently on either side of 20 hz.

speed up any rhythm enough, and it will turn into a continuous tone.

lower the pitch of any tone enough, and it will turn into a rhythmic pattern. i'm sure everyone is familiar with the nasty flapping, farting sounds that can result when searching for low low bass. it's like the sound falls apart when pushed too low.

this being the case, does anybody deliberately choose to compose rhythms using timbres that contain the same patterns? would the pattern recognition capability of our brains recognize the fractal nature of such music? or would it be a waste of time?

i know that there are experiments like this being done by people at MIT, but is anybody using this sort of thing out in the "real world"? i've been thinking about it for a while, but so far haven't put much effort into it.
I've heard a number of hardstyle tracks which use this concept as a build-up technique. Usually the track is progressively sped up until it reaches a point where it is heard as a solid tone, taking the role as the main lead, with the original elements of the the track being re-indtroduced shortly after.
It's a pretty effective technique, but could end up sounding hackneyed if used too often...

Using ideas like this in different manners, such as those that have been described in this thread could be quite productive, no doubt producing some interesting results.

And for reference, I think the composer John Cage worked with the concept of fractal music a fair, so you might be interested in looking at some of his work.

Lastly - I just found these fractal music generators whilst looking up this subject - haven't tried using them yet, but they might be quite fun....

Musinum - http://reglos.de/musinum/
Fractmus - http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Haven/4386/