Most traditional Chinese music uses the major pentatonic (five-tone) scale, comprised of C D E G A notes. Richard F. Voss studied "scaling noises" (a term coined by Mandelbrot), and found that the pentatonic scale with rhythm and pitch varied with "1/f noise" (pink noise) strongly resembled "Oriental music". I tried replicating this here with three octaves of the scale, and if I didn't know any better I'd say the pink noise is pretty nice to listen to. I suggest playing around with the instruments!
Based on Martin Gardner's "Fractal Music" column in the Scientific American. The underlying maths: White noise is perhaps the simplest form of scaling noise, where the pitch and rhythm are randomised for each note. Brown ("Brownian", after Brownian motion) noise is also fairly simple, where the pitch and rhythm change (from their value for the previous note) by a random amount. The spectral density of white noise is 1/f^0, and of brown noise is 1/f^2. Pink noise is by definition in the middle of both of these, thus having a spectral density of 1/f. A simplistic way to calculate pseudo-pink noise (a listener could likely not tell the difference) is used here: the binary form of each note's number is written out, and one die is associated with each digit. If a digit changes from the binary form of one note to the next, that note's corresponding die is rerolled. If not, the die keeps the value it had for the previous note. Only three dice are used here for simplicity, but more could be used to achieve a more accurate effect. The same process is applied to the tempo.
