Creating Music Visualizations in a Mandelbrot Set Explorer

Abstract: The aim of this thesis is to implement a Mandelbrot Set Explorer that includes the functionality to create music visualizations. The Mandelbrot set is an important mathematical object, and the arguably most famous so called fractal. One of its outstanding attributes is its beauty, and therefore there are several implementations that visualize the set and allow it to navigate around it. In this thesis methods are discussed to visualize the set and create music visualizations consisting of zooms into the Mandelbrot set. For that purpose methods for analysing music are implemented, so user created zooms can react to the music that is played. Mainly the thesis deals with problems that occur during the process of developing this application to create music visualizations. Especially problems concerning performance and usability are focused. The thesis will reveal that it is in fact possible to create very aesthetically pleasing music visualizations by using zooms into the Mandelbrot set. The biggest drawback is the lack in performance, because of the high computation effort, and therefore the difficulties in rendering the visualization in real-time.