Labs: Vexations

Had a little fun with Vexations, by Erik Satie.

Vexations is a seemingly short piece for solo piano, if it weren’t for the open performance directions:

Pour se jouer 840 fois de suite ce motif, il sera bon de se préparer au préalable, et dans le plus grand silence, par des immobilités sérieuses

This loosely translates to “To play this piece 840 times by yourself, it is advised that you immobilise yourself in preparation”. A live performance of this was conducted by a team of pianist cum contemporary composers (the only people insane enough to attempt such a feat) including John Cage, composer of the infamous “ 4′33” “. The performance had only 1 member in the audience: Andy Warhol.

This little app plays the piece, and repeats as many times as long as you keep it open. I finally got to experimenting with the computeSpectrum() method, which was highly interesting.

I couldn’t get embedFont working, so I gave up and stuck to device fonts.

Experimental Focus:

  • SoundMixer.computeSpectrum()
  • Sound
  • TextField

View the experiment

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