What is a sloth canon, and what makes these canons fractal?
In a sloth canon, every part plays the same tune, at different speeds. The sloth canons you make with Tune Smithy are special, since, as well as sloth canons they are also fractal in time – they use exactly the same architecture at many different time scales. If you leave out the first, fastest part, then speed the rest of the tune up a bit so that the second part reaches the tempo of the original first part, then it will play exactly the same notes as before (perhaps octave shifted). The old third part will now play the notes originally played by the second part, and so on. The first three examples (3, 4 and 5 beat fractal tune) take this a bit further. Each faster part is quieter then the next slower part and the fastest part is almost inaudible. If you play the tune faster and make it so quiet that the first part becomes inaudible, then the entire tune sounds exactly the same as before, just a bit quieter. Also the tunes “almost repeat” – if you listen out to any section, say one mi
