Music has always had the ability to be generated from images, take FL Studio’s image resynthesis as an example of this, using the artifacts from a jpeg or png file as modulators in a synthesiser to generate a completely new and original sound. This technique has been applied in genres from psychedelic ambient, such as Llydia Lancaster’s musical work, and sitting in that Guildford dorm room, the screen casting blue light onto the nicotine-stained walls, I saw the Ueda attractor not as a visual curiosity but as a direct line into the body’s own chaotic regulatory systems, a way to generate frequencies that could entrain the vagus nerve, the same nerve that Breit et al. described as the main parasympathetic highway, the bidirectional link between the brain and the gastrointestinal tract, the modulator of mood through its connections to the nucleus tractus solitarii, the locus coeruleus, the amygdala, the nerve whose stimulation has been shown to treat refractory depression and posttraumatic stress disorder by inhibiting proinflammatory cytokines and increasing monoaminergic tone, and I thought, if an electrode can do this, why not a sound, why not a binaural beat whose carrier frequency is modulated by the Ueda attractor’s variables, a sound that never repeats yet stays within a bounded spectral envelope, mirroring the healthy variability of a high-vagal-tone heart rate, the respiratory sinus arrhythmia that indicates resilience.

These has often produced sounds with very, incomprehensible and novel qualities, with results often then being heavily edited in post to produce the feeling the artist desires. Using models such as the Ueda Attractor, we can generate a new type of sound with far more variables we can control, by inputting different variables into its equation, variables that correspond to the sigma, rho, and beta parameters of the Lorenz-like system, each value shifting the trajectory from fixed point to limit cycle to strange attractor, and I realised that by mapping these parameters to the frequency and amplitude modulation depths of a binaural beat, I was essentially designing a non-linear vagus nerve stimulator, a sonic version of the transcutaneous auricular VNS that stimulates the auricular branch of the vagus nerve without surgery, the chaotic fluctuations preventing habituation, keeping the nervous system responsive, the same principle that makes the heart rate of a healthy person irregularly irregular, a fractal rhythm that the paper by Breit et al. identified as a marker of well-being, diminished in PTSD, in depression, in inflammatory bowel disease, all conditions I saw in myself, in my friends, in Ivor before he died, and I wanted to build a sound that could bring that variability back.

Figure 1.0: A representation of the Ueda Attractor in action. Taken from: https://rreusser.github.io/ueda-attractor/
Attractor models in FM synthesis
The chaotic FM algorithm includes conventional FM synthesis as a subset. This chaotic FM method can be combined with other chaotic synthesis methods, such as the Ueda attractor, providing an even wider range of sounds. Chaotic synthesis and filtering can be used in both the analog and digital domains, providing similar results.^[1]

The chaotic FM algorithm, when tuned to the edge of chaos where a periodic carrier begins to bifurcate into noise, produces a spectrum that is neither purely tonal nor purely stochastic, a liminal timbre that the ear reads as organic, as alive, and this is precisely the quality that the vagus nerve responds to, the afferent fibers of the gut and the auricular branch firing in patterns that the brain interprets as signals from a living, fluctuating interior, not the sterile monotony of a fixed-frequency tone but the rich, unpredictable hum of a body in dialogue with itself, a sound that, when delivered binaurally, creates an interhemispheric coherence that the paper by Breit et al. would call a vagal-mediated restoration of the brain–gut axis, the cholinergic anti-inflammatory pathway activated by nothing more than air vibrating between two headphone drivers, the Ueda attractor’s dense fractal orbit translated into a sonic massage for the tenth cranial nerve, the wanderer nerve, the nerve that brought me back from the edge of a dissociated void more times than I can count.

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