This is a Processing sketch that lets the user explore fractal wavetable synthesis.
A variable bank of sliders control the “seed” pattern used to recursively subdivide the waveform data — starting with the number “1”.

So for a pattern of “1, 0.5, 1” (the default for this sketch), the first three iterations are:

1

1 0.5 1

1 0.5 1 0.5 0.25 0.5 1 0.5 1

Keep doing this until you have enough numbers for a few seconds of audio, and voila! the sketch begins playing a loop of what the data sounds like when played back as raw audio data.

Thanks to Terran Olson’s work on audio fractals that inspired this sketch. See this article for more info.

Visit Raintone.com for live examples, and more info on other projects.