‘EVERYONE will tell you I am not a musician. That's correct,’ Satie wrote in ‘Ce que je suis’, the first section of his Mémoires d’un amnésique. Satie includes a reference to this critical judgement: the author cited is Octave Séré, author of a book on contemporary French music and pseudonym of Jean Poueigh, who sued Satie for libel after Parade. Satie goes on to say, ‘Since the start of my career, I have been classified amongst the phonometrographers. My works are pure phonometrography. Whether one considers Le Fils des étoiles or the Morceaux en forme de poire, En habit de cheval or the Sarabandes, one notices that no musical idea presided over the construction of these works. It is scientific thought which is dominant.’ It would be easy to dismiss such a statement as a facetious and amusing commentary on the classification habits of musicologists, but in fact it is more fruitful to view Satie in the light of his genuine interest in contemporary scientific discoveries. Satie's lifetime saw enormous changes in Paris, the city in which he lived since the age of ten: scientific knowledge and its application leapt forward hugely.

At the same time Satie was ambivalent about modernity and innovation. His friend Debussy's description of him as a ‘gentle medieval musician strayed into this century’ implies a rejection of the modern world, but this does not take account of Satie's desire to engage with the new. This engagement might well be playful, could embody a critical or suspicious stance, or conversely could express admiration of the new world.

The composer's description of himself as a phonometrographer has three components: sound, measurement and writing. Satie refers to other forms of musical ‘measurement’ in this article, examining ‘a B𐌜 of average weight’ with a phonoscope (which he found ‘disgusting’), and weighing with a ‘phono-scale’ (phonopeseur) an ‘ordinary, very common or garden F#, which weighed 93 kilograms’. He then asks the reader: