Skip to Content

Music for Shuffle features music designed for the iPod shuffle

This is fascinating to me -- musician Matthew Irvine Brown has compiled a set of 18 musical tracks, about an hour of music total, designed to be played in random order on the iPod shuffle. There was a lot of care and thought put into this as he designed the music to be atmospheric pieces. Even when shuffled, they'll work together no matter which order they're played. He also designed the sound of the music to fit with the iPod shuffle, hiding the glitch heard as the iPod switches tracks. As a final bonus, Matthew designed separate cover art for each track, so as a tune plays in iTunes, the cover art shows a very rough "animation."

You can see a two-minute sample of the work after the break, and download all of the music for free in a zip file if you want to give it a shot. Brown also says that the work is an example of "skip button as instrument," too. You can hit the skip button whenever you want to jump to the next track and change tempo or tone as you see fit. It's a cool composition meant specifically for Apple's smallest iPod.



Categories

Music iPod

This is fascinating to me -- musician Matthew Irvine Brown has compiled a set of 18 musical tracks, about an hour of music total, designed...
 

Add a Comment

*0 / 3000 Character Maximum Comment Moderation Enabled. Your comment will appear after it is cleared by an editor.

9 Comments

Filter by:
josh

omg...someone should totally do a version of this using 'In C' by Terry Riley.

January 20 2011 at 3:39 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
David Lee

W. Cullen Hart did something similar; I'm not certain of the name or if it's even being sold, but it was for multiple devices on independent shuffle. Even more insane.

January 20 2011 at 7:44 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Jason

Very cool IDE? I hope others take this idea and run with it.

But Schramm, one mistake: you write, "about an hour of music total". Not true. The amount of music is only a couple of minutes or so. Brown wrote on his blog that he created these tracks over the course of about an hour.

January 20 2011 at 1:29 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
williamnealot82

I've been thinking about getting one just for running. The only thing is, I'm not a huge fan of shuffled playlists. If I put music on the ipod is there an option to just play it straight through without the shuffle feature on .
http://plaqueattackreview.com/

January 20 2011 at 1:03 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
2 replies to williamnealot82's comment
Rdnymllnsktr

Yes. Off, Play In Order, Shuffle.

You can also make playlists. The voice over (which can be turned off) will tell you what playlist is playing.

http://www.apple.com/ipodshuffle/#controls

January 20 2011 at 1:27 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
TIm

Just a word of advice from a burned kid. Never ever buy a player without a display. I got the shuffle as gift and I hated not being able to skip to a song I wanted to listen to at that moment or fast forward in a podcast. You can in theory do that, but without the visual feedback it can be really cumbersome to find the spot you are looking for. I personally have had my glitches with the voice commands, especially commuting in a full train or bus, shouting at your player. Not sure how well it works breathing heavily when running.

Buy a Nano or go for a cheap ass, no brand player.

T.

January 20 2011 at 4:16 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Gareth Burleigh

Kind of a reworking of Gescoms Minidisc

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minidisc_(album)

January 19 2011 at 8:42 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Ennrib

Sounds better than it sounds, or should I say, reads better than it sounds!

Nice idea though!

January 19 2011 at 8:17 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to Ennrib's comment
Rdnymllnsktr

Sadly, I agree. This sounded really cool, but then I played the video, and thought it wasn't that good at all.

January 19 2011 at 9:01 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Buy an ad here

Tweets

© 2012 AOL Inc. All Rights Reserved.