It's one of those pieces where the sounds I use have direct meaning for me. Here they are:

• One of the very first videos that Lian and Itay sent to us was a short clip of Shai in his 'swing-o-matic'. It was playing a goofy version of Johann Pachelbel's famous Canon in D. It was completely out-of-sync with the swings, but Shai was sleeping soundly. What a baby! What a boy! The string background sounds heard throughout SSN are a time-stretched and folded version of that piece.
  
  
• The melody of the whistles heard half-way through the piece is an abstracted version of a song I would sing to Shai while we were visiting at the end of May. I would sing "Shai, Shai Neeman" over and over to the tune of the Passover song Dayenu ("dai dai enu, dai dai enu..."; also the melody for the children's song "B-I-N-G-O"). He seemed to like it.
  
  
• I used a sample of whistling for the melody because Shai's dad (Itay!) seems to enjoy whistling around their home. I'm not even sure he's aware of this.
  
  
• There is another melody that is played on a rubbed glass -- the glass harmonica sound -- that appears along with the whistling. It's taken from a piece I wrote for Lian shortly after her birth, Sleeps All Night. Lian didn't "sleep all night" for at least a year, and Shai seems to be following in her footsteps.
  
  For the glass-harmonica sound, I used one of the glasses that Lian and Itay gave away at their wedding:
  
  
  
  
  
• There is a short quote from Debussy's Clair de Lune. I recall my mother playing that piece on the piano when I was young. And I really like that piece.