Fractint is designed to allow you to produce beautiful images, but with the latest version of Fractint for DOS (version 20) you can also produce fascinating fractal music.

Previous versions were capable of playing the "sound" of a fractal image being calculated - by translating, as they are calculated, the distances on the 'Z' axis into audio frequencies and sending them to the little speaker that is built into your PC. The result was generally a peculiar electronic noise that might be of passing interest but was neither arresting nor beautiful.

But the latest version includes basic sound card support and, more importantly, allows you to control the sound in various ways:

•	You can choose any one of the eight basic waveforms (sounds) that are built into most sound cards.
•	You can then edit the waveform for attack, decay, sustain, etc.
•	You can tell the program to shift the pitch of each sound to the nearest note on the Western musical scales.
•	You can alter the speed at which the calculations are done - which alters the speed at which the notes are played.
•	Most importantly, you can now create a translation table that says, in effect, "whenever you calculate this note, play that note instead." Using this facility you can, for example, tell the program to use only the notes of the D major scale, or only the black notes on a piano.

The results can be hauntingly beautiful.

You can listen to some examples of my fractal music by clicking on the speaker icons below: in each case you will be listening to the music produced by Fractint (according to the rules I selected on its sound parameters screens) as it calculated part of the image to its left.

These two-minute extracts usually represent a tiny part of the image: in order to hear what's going on you often have to slow down Fractint's calculations to such a degree that it would take hours - or even days - to complete the image.

Note: to listen to instant streaming direct from the web you must have either Windows Media Player or Real Player - version G2, 7, or higher - installed on your PC. An MP3 will play on just about any PC, but unless you have both a reasonably fast connection and software that can stream MP3s you will have to download it and save it to disk before you can listen to it (this will probably take two or three minutes)

Fractal Image	Title (Fractal Type)	Windows Media	Real Audio	MP3
	Gingerbread Man 2
	Chip 1 *
	LamdaFnFn 2
	BarnsleyM2 1
	Gingerbread Man 1

The following are short extracts from a set of fractal quintets.

Each track was created by merging five recordings that use the same fractal formula but different sound parameters, to give the effect of five instruments playing different variations on the same theme. The results tend to sound to me like "Terry Riley plays Baroque" (or, sometimes, Philip Glass ditto).

Note: These multi-track pieces don't exactly benefit from the comparatively poor reproduction provided by modem-quality streams. The MP3s are of somewhat higher quality than those used elsewhere on the site, but could well take the best part of ten minutes each to download. The format used is 44KHz variable rate ('variable' around the 120Kbps mark).