Idle hands are the Devil's workshop - LOL Too funny.

Delightful! I'm sharing this with all my fellow techies.

Chris, I'll do my best, but be forewarned that this joke of a "work" is the product of the sense of humor of a software engineer who, through some mechanism unknown to himself, composes sacred music.

- This "composition" (cough, cough), as a whole, mimics the audio feedback a modem or fax machine makes when connecting to the internet via dialup (or simply connecting over phone lines to another machine) and sending a fax.

-- Measures 1-2 begin with a "dial tone."
-- Measures 3 and 4 are the fax machine dialing the phone number of the recipient fax machine.
-- Measure 5 is the delay between dialing and the fax machine trying to establish communication with the recipient machine.
-- While the fax machine is establishing its connection (similar to waiting for the recipient to pick up the receiver), it gives a lower audible tone to indicate it is trying to connect (measures 6-8). This repeats until the connection is established.
-- Once the connection is established, the fax machine or modem gives a higher tone (measure 9). At this point, the user is joyful, no longer waiting uneasily for the connection to be made (or not be made).
-- Then the actual fax data are sent by audio signal, sounding something like measures 10-12, but with more white noise than in the attached rendering. In the audio rendering, this sound is simulated by trilling a guitar fret noise sound effect (general MIDI sound 121).
-- Measure 13 is just there to end the piece on Do. A fax machine may or may not give feedback that the fax went through. Some fax machines print an acknowledgement and others just end, leaving you hopeful but uncertain. A computer sending a fax over a connected modem might perhaps play an alert sound, such as in measure 13, to indicate it is done.

- This hymn tune named FAXTED is, of course, a pun on the hymn tune named THAXTED, taken from the Jupiter section of The Planets by Gustav Holst. FAXTED uses the initial 10 notes of the THAXTED melody as the dialing sequence of the recipient fax machine.

- The hymn text perhaps most frequently set to THAXTED is O God Beyond All Praising. By contrast, this parody sets to music the words "O Song Beyond All Guessing," for these lyrics are so ridiculous as to be unguessed or unrecognizable, yet they follow a similar pattern to the text being parodied.

- Of course, hymns have a meter by which the lyrics flow poetically. The "meter" given for FAXTED shows how these lyrics are divided among the musical lines. Of course, no real poem would have a ridiculous meter like 1:10:4:1, let a lone a baud rate included. The baud rate is how many pulses of data are sent per second (equivalent to bits per second if one bit is sent per pulse), so it is a description of what is going on in measures 10-12, where the fax data are sent at 9600 baud.

- The subtitle takes advantage of the fact that an 'r' followed by an 'n' looks a lot like an 'm'. Thus instead of being a song for the modern world, this is a song for the modem world. A modem is a device that sends digital data, such as a fax. The ones we are most familiar with send data over telephone lines, but there are also modems capable of sending data to a radio that then transmits the data over radio frequency (RF).

That's about it :-)