Satie's Vexations Performed On A MakerBot

Here's some great-sounding video with a performance of a MakerBot playing Erik Satie's Vexations.

Quickly, Vexations is a short composition, with the accompanying direction to play it through 840 times in a row.

From the video site:

"Vexations" (1893) composed by French composer Erik Satie has long been a darling of the music avant garde. (And was particularly inspiring to American composer John Cage.) A short manuscript famous for its inscription: "In order to play the theme 840 times in succession, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, and in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities," the piece has been peformed a handful of times over the years by teams in tandem or single performers in its "full" 840 repetitons glory.
 
The midi source used to generate the gcode for this performance was itself taken from a 28-hour performance of the piece by pianist Armin Fuchs in May 2000, in Dresden, Germany and as a result there is a subtle human shift in phrasing over the course of the approximate 28 hour gcode document. The piece has not (yet) been performed in its entirety on a MakerBot, but the piece has been successfully run for over an hour. The xyz-axis belts of Bot2000, "Gidget," were left intentionally more slack than usual to give the performance something of a cello sound, accentuating the attack on each note slightly to emphasize its human performance rather than purely mechanical repetition.
 
For more examples of MakerBot CNC bots performing music, and for details on the scripting and hacking done by the MakerBot community to make this work possible, check out: http://wiki.makerbot.com/makerbot-music . Also, take a look at this site about the sources I used for this gcode encoding: http://musicweb.hmt-hannover.de/satie/