fractal loops (was: keeping loops interesting)

["Rainer Thelonius Balthasar Straschill" <rs@moinlabs.de>]

> But I am still at loss how this applies to music. Are folks 
> saying that you create a piece of music where the pattern as 
> a whole can be found repeated in a similar way inside that 
> overall pattern?  I need a more concrete example of this. 

Ok, try this as an example (and you can play along using Mobius if you
like...):

first start off with a very simple melodic segment. Like C Ab D G in 
quarter
notes legato. You now have a one-bar loop.
Now copy that loop to another track and set that to Rate -24. This loop now
plays with 1/4 of the tempo. Now you got your fractal counterpoint. Of
course, those Baroque counterpoint guys will smack you because you move in
fifth parallels at the end of bar four...but if you do something like it
without the ugly parallels, this is something J.S.Bach has done before
numerous times.

Now for something even more interesting. Transpose your first loop one
octave down, so it becomes a bass line. Mute your second loop (the four bar
length one) and record a third loop. Here you play chords, each one one bar
in length:

1: G-Bb-Eb (Eb chord)
2: F-C-D (Dm7)
3: F-Ab-C (Fm)
4: F-B-D (B0)

Now you have this repeating one-bar melody over a four-bar chord
progression. Add a HipHop-Jazz drum groove at a tempo of 98bpm and play 
some
soft lead parts, and you're in lounge-style territory. What is fractal 
here?
If you examine these chords closely, they all form trunctated chords
(missing the root), except for the second, which can be seen as a chord
missing its third.

If you now complete the missing notes in your mind, the chords become:

1: Cm7 (the C missing)
2: Fm6 (the Ab missing)
3: Dm7b5 (the D missing)
4: G7 (the G missing)

And the missing notes in sequence form...your intial loop! Fractal all the
way. Btw, hiding some theme in missing notes of a chord progression is a
trick invented by Beethoven in his op. 110 piano sonata (or was it op111 
?).

        Rainer