Wow! It was right around 25 years ago that I stumbled on to Fractint. I was new to computer graphics, and immediately became intrigued by fractals in general, and specifically, in Fractint's ability to produce crude, rudimentary sounds from the fractal calculations. Tim Wegner had introduced the sound capability in order to impart on one of his sight-impaired followers a feeling for fractals and chaos without needing the visual output of the calculations for input to the senses. That has been my main focus with Fractint over the years...Audio Fractals. I became really intrigued watching the orbit points come and go as Fractint cranked away at the calculations. It was much more fun for me to watch as the fractal image was built than to see the final result. The journey became the focus, rather than the destination. I like to think that I was somewhat instrumental in pushing for increased sophistication in the way that Fractint handled Audio Fractals. It was partially a result of my prodding that the team (I think it was Tim...maybe Jonathan) inserted the ORBITSAVE=text parameter. That txt file, sound.txt, became the basic working unit for all my MIDI based Audio Fractals. So why not Fractal Music? I suppose the question could be posed: Why not Fractal Art? To me, a fractal is the calculation. If "your thing" is visual, then you are probably more interested in the visual expression of that calcualtion - an image on a monitor or in print. What I see in a visual fractal is the aftermath of dead orbits. When the value of a point exceeds the limit, it dies and a color is generated for that test point. Just my opinion, of course, but I think visual fractals are realtively mundane. I mean no offense - as I assume those who express their dislike of "Fractal Music" don't mean to offend those of us whose love of fractals leads us in a different direction. So why not Fractal Music? Because "music" is a subjective term and quite personal in nature. One person's cacaphony of noise may be another's starting point for adventure. I prefer to call my stuff "Audio Fractals", since that term avoids the issue of "is it music?" entirely. You can decide. Whether one considers it music or something else doesn't matter to me. What counts is "Is it interesting? Is it fractal?" In my experience there are two basic schisms in the Fractal Music/Audio Fractals world. There are those who produce sounds by using some sort of mapping routine - mapping colors of fractal images to sounds - and those that use the values of each iterative test of a single point in the fractal plane to determine the sounds. Here on the Fractint list we actually have practicioners of both approaches. Albrecht appears to follow the mapping path, picking interesting looking fractal images and, using his special algorythms, overlays, manipulates, massages and shifts to produce his trademark hypnotic, meditative and comfortable sound...almost trance inducing. Far from the chaotic images that are used for input, in my opinion. I would love to hear some discussion as to whether sounds mapped from a fractal image are, in themselves, fractal or not. Are they any different from the sounds produced by the same manipulations of non-fractal images with some variety in them? Would one be able to say with any certainty in a blind test which sounds came from the fractal image and which from the non-fractal image? Albrecht and I have had our own discussions about this, but I would love to get input from others. I am definitely an advocate and practicioner of the iterative approach. I started in the early 1990's by hanging an old Radio Shack mic over a disassembled 286's exposed PC speaker, and recording the sounds produced using Fractint v15.11 - fan noise and all - to my 386. When MIDI became popular and soundcards got good enough to work fairly well, I undertook a years-long project, using MF2T.exe and T2MF.exe to convert the values and timings produced by the sound.txt file to MIDI messages. It was a fascinating project. Using MIDI one can produce sounds that are more familiar to the ear than the raw Fractint-produced sounds. But one always runs the risk of overdoing things, and I am certainly guilty as charged of abusing a new toy. Even using my approach one can manipulate the files enough that they lose some of their fractal character. I loved the MIDI game I played, but my heart is really with the sounds generated within Fractint itself. As a side note: back in the early 90's when Fractint was on Compuserve, a member of the group, Dan Farmer, asked me why I didn't just map sound to image. I told him then as I would now: Because the joy is in the journey, not the destination. It would take an infinite amount of time to play the whole journey. I have been asked to post the images produced by my Audio Fractals, but it is generally a waste of time...my Audio Fractals only use the orbit calculations of a few dozen pixels each...even the longer ones. And if I increased the bailout values they would take even longer to be played. I am posting this because, as I get older (I didn't start with Fractint until I was in my early 40's) not only am I forgetting things, but, having long wanted to introduce my attempts at entertainment to the present day fractalists, the sad fact is that time is running out. I have great hopes of being able to resume my work on Audio Fractals, if the press of business and age ever allow. In the mean time I have started uploading a variety of 1990's vintage Audio Fractal .mp3 files to my new Audio Fractals web site: https://sites.google.com/site/audiofractals/. The MIDI files are all on page 1 "Sound of Chaos CD" which has the complete 1994 CD converted to .mp3. I hope you will check out the site and files and that no one has been offended by my message. I only want to stimulate discussion and perhaps inject a little vitality into the maps v. orbits subject. Cheers, Bill Jemison