Following up on this afternoon, I ended up creating two patches to help Matt Rung with his loop idea.  I thought they might be useful generally, so they are attached here.  This is still using the "openpanel" method of loading opening for convenience, but there are many other ways.  I have the gamelan sample patch I mentioned today around here somewhere (my home machine).  If I can find it, I'll post it for your perusal.

UPDATE: You will find the gamelan patch attached below as well (it is a zip archive since I included the soundfiles, all from sflib).  Unpack the folder, and open "auto_trigger.pd".  Hit GO and listen to my pattern!  I think this turned out pretty well given how trivial is it.  The coolest part happens right when you open the patch, auto-loading all of the files into the arrays with a line (could also have been a counter)!!

BONUS: I included a second subfolder of samples within the gamelan folder, african percussion samples to try in place of the gamelan sounds.  Just place them in the main directory (overwriting the gamelan samples) and listen again, whah-la, new samples, new riff.