Our daughter wanted to "freeze dance" (music plays, stopping at random intervals, at which the dancing kids freeze in place until the music resumes). So what is a geek dad to do? Load up a playlist of kids' music in cmus, start playing the music, and let the shell randomly freeze and resume the music

user$ while true ; do sleep $(( $RANDOM % 15 + 5)) ; cmus-remote -u ; sleep 4; cmus-remote -u ;  done

This does as sleep for some random interval between 5 and 20 seconds, then does as sleep for 4 seconds before unpausing the music.

You could do something similar with mpd/mpc if you prefer them.