Sound and Music from Chua's Circuit

Nonlinear Dynamics have been very inspiring for musicians, but have rarely been considered specifically for sound synthesis. We discuss here the signals produced by Chua's circuit from an acoustical and musical point of view. We have designed a real-time simulation of Chua's circuit on a digital workstation allowing for easy experimentation with the properties and behaviors of the circuit and of the sounds. A surprisingly rich and novel family of musical sounds has been obtained. The audification of the local properties of the parameter space allows for easy determination of very complex structures which could not be computed analytically and would not be simple to determine by other methods. Finally, we have found that the time-delayed Chua's circuit can model the basic behavior of an interesting class of musical instruments.