There’s an article on Shift.com about a new piece of software called Venharis. It’s a 3D game that generates fractal music.
Navigating with the arrow keys, you round a corner. You are inside a large alien room with moving panels and a floating fractal hologram. Suddenly you notice an alien hovering nearby in a flying saucer. With lightning-fast reflexes, you target the alien and punch the mouse button. But the alien does not explode into a thousand gory pieces.
It plays you a song.
Phil Thompson’s Venharis, which was completed last week, is not a shoot-’em-up. Venharis is a music composer and generator wrapped in a 3D gaming environment — with a plot. In it, you’re investigating an artifact that leads you to a meeting place between two worlds, where different species communicate through music. There are different areas to explore, and each area has a different utility in terms of the musical composition. In the hologram area, you create pieces of music. Then it’s down the elevator and through some doors to the nebula area to adjust the temporal aspects of your piece: Change the tempo, schedule starts and stops. Although it’s not a game in the strictest sense, it looks and feels like one.
Update: I can’t find the software anywhere, but here’s a track composed using it.