Randomnopédie

[EXCITING UPDATE: I finally found a technology (MIT's Scratch) to construct my ideal random Gymnopédie player. See/hear it in action here. Also, I performed a "live-randomized" version at my September, 2013 recital. Performance is here.]

Here's a lazy, aimless post for a lazy summer's day. Erik Satie's famous Gymnopédies have a kind of timeless, anti-gravity quality that makes them seem both like they could go on forever and that they're not going anywhere in particular. I've wondered for awhile about the possibility of creating a system that would play through one of these pieces by jumping randomly from phrase to phrase. So, finally I did something about it with the particularly iconic No. 1. Download this zipped folder of 20 mp3s, put them into an iTunes playlist, set for shuffle and you may never need to do anything again as time may actually stop.

Unfortunately, it turns out to be much harder to get a web-based audio playlist to shuffle without highly annoying gaps occurring between each "track," so I haven't yet created the perfect "Randomnopédie" player, but perhaps I'll figure it out. In the meantime, you can head over here and hear the phrases amble by randomly with only slight (but still annoying) spaces between the phrases. (You'd think Soundcloud could get this right, but no...)

More to come...including, perhaps, a fully "backwards" version and a possible Trois Gymnopédies version in which phrases from all three pieces are freely intermingled.

Randomnopédie

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Update: backwards version has been posted: