Vexations, c. 1893 Vexations, c. 1893"In order to play the motif 840 times in succession, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, and in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities."
It’s unclear whether Satie actually intended for the performer to attempt to play this short piece 840 times, or even if he composed it for public performance at all. The piece was largely ignored until an eighteen-hour marathon performance by twelve rotating pianists in 1963 at the Pocket Theater in Manhattan.
My interpretation for FM synthesizer starts by using parameters that produce a sound similar to an electric piano. Each repetition, a single random bit is flipped in the FM chip’s registers to gradually distort the timbre. The chip’s internal state is shown on the monitor; bits that have been flipped are shown in red. Keyboard commands are provided to manually change the sound or reset to the original parameters if the music has become inaudible.
displayed at Arcade UFO running on PS/2 model 30
editing source in Turbo C++ 3.0 for DOS
