A list of Algorithmic Composition and other Computer Creativity Resources

Algorithmic Composition

Among the most readable (in my opinion) are

  1. Elaine Walker's MSc. thesis from 2001 (the year not the film) describing fractal (chaos) methods, their advantages and (at the time) limitations: Chaos Melody Theory.

    Elaine Walker is a highly respected US composer who has made significant contributions to the fields of Algorithmic Composition and Electronic Music.
    Her personal web site (here) summarizes her work in this and other areas, as well as providing some examples of compositions produced by her technique.
    [Note: Ms. Walker's web site is being developed, so while the links given were active at the time of writing (26/1/18) these may have changed.]
    Further information may be found on Wikipedia

  2. A more recent brief article is
    S. Sukumaran & D. Thiyagarajan. Generation of fractal music with Mandelbrot set. Global Journal of Computer Science and Technology, 9(4):127-130, 2009
  3. Questions of mapping from numbers to musical sounds were looked at by the distinguished Scientific American columnist (and author) Martin Gardner (1914-2010).
    His paper on the subject, which originally appeared as one of his Scientific American columns, may be found here.
  4. A much more extensive collection of resources and links may be found on Wikipedia.

Complex Numbers & Fractal Analysis of Structures

There is a similar range of material covering topics from formal definitions to applications in Computer Art, analysis of texts (both literary and non-fiction). The following provide good summaries:

  1. Fractal art techniques
  2. Software for Generating Fractals
  3. Recent article on fractal analysis of literature
  4. Keyword extraction from texts
  5. Zip's Law has been used as a (statistical) approach to the analysis of (amongst others) music and text: while not identical to there are similarities to phenomena observed in fractal dimension. A good overview of this is presented by

    S.T. Piantadosi. Zipf’s word frequency law in natural language: A critical review and future directions, Psychonomic Bulletin &}Review, 21(5):1112-1130, 2014

    A detailed study of links between subjective appeal of musical forms, Zipf's Law and (indirectly) fractal dimension is presented in

    B. Manaris, J. Romero, P. Machado, D. Krehbiel, T. Hirzel, W. Pharr and R.B. Davis. Zipf's law, music classification, and aesthetics, Computer Music Journal, 29(1):55-69, 2005