Interaction designer Matthew Irvine Brown may have come up with the best use for shuffle mode: to create a unique, continuous stream of music. Brown’s project called Music for Shuffle spans released 18 individual tracks, each a different musical phrase built around a droning core. The practical upshot of which is that when you load the on your MP3 player and shuffle the tracks, they move (more or less) seamlessly from one to the other creating one piece of music.
While these tracks can be played on any digital device with a shuffle mode, Brown does specifically mention the iPod shuffle and how he ingeniously worked around an audio issue with that device.
On an iPod Shuffle, you tend to hear a bit of clicking when you skip tracks quickly, so to make these transitions less noticeable, I ended up sampling the skipping noises and using them as rhythmic and textural elements.
This also plays into a concept Brown calls “using the skip button as an instrument,” where the listener can interact with the music by skipping forward or backward to create new rhythms.
Brown’s efforts have paid off, since the resulting tunes are actually quite enjoyable to hear making it one of the most clever uses of the basic music player functionality we’ve come to take for granted with digital players. The whole 18-track opus is available for downloaded from Brown’s website.
(Matthew Irvine Brown via Metafilter)
