For those of you lucky enough to attend Maker Faire a few weeks ago, you may have noticed one of the Bots off to the side making noise but not in fact printing anything. That noise was actually music, and the music was a 28 hour performance of Erik Satie’s 1893 “Vexations,” performed by Armin Fuchs in Dresden in the year 2000.

We named the robotic musician “Gidget” to celebrate his status as our 2000th MakerBot. Gidget is a Cupcake CNC assembled by Widget live last month. Gidget’s impressive performance may have been the most underappreciated event at Maker Faire. His programmer Matt Griffin said, “For some reason, it was extremely easy to make this MakerBot perform it – this particular one – with its really loose belt.”

Coincidentally, the New Yorker featured an article on John Cage the following week, and mentioned the inspirational influence of “Vexations” on him.

Matt made a lovely video of Gidget performing the piece, and plans to upload the code to Thingiverse so you can program your own MakerBot to sing you to sleep. Also, look for an upcoming blog post by Matt where he explains how he made this musical magic happen.

At Maker Faire NYC, people were universally in awe of DIY 3-D printing machines. MakerBot Industries celebrated the release of the brand new Thing-O-Matic by printing and giving away objects, frosting bread, making drawings and playing music with MakerBots. Check out how citizens reacted in this video.

In short? Their minds were blown.