LO 4 Sound art

The Long player
The long player is a thousand year long “musical piece” created by composer and artist Jem Finer. It started playing on the midnight of the 31st of December 1999 and won’t repeat itself until 2999. The piece itself is in reality a re-interpretation of a source piece that is 20 minutes and 20 secs in length. After being reprocessed by a simple computer algorithm, the variations and combos can be played for a runtime of 1000 years. The algorithm is written in the SuperCollider language, and is actually itself written to plan for the eventual failure and obsoleteness of current technology. Thus, the music score itself was designed to be able to be played on any instrument with any technology. Finer, produced the piece after spending several years studying musical systems, however the piece itself presents an exploration on a far larger scale. With the piece lasting 1000 years, the piece is a reflection and exploration on the concept of time, scale, ephemerality and our traditional ideas about music. Although the score is predetermined, the exact way the piece will be played is a constant unknown for a human listening to it because of the vast scale it exists on. For finer, the piece is an exploration into the unknown, something that will capture the human imagination on a unfathomable level.

The LongPlayer