dottocomu

World's largest cellphone orchestra

[Note: We are run off our feet as year-end approaches, hence the limited updates]

Via K-Tai Watch, a story that mobile content provider Dwango has attempted a world record (they're even applying to the Guinness Book)--a performance by the world's biggest cellphone "orchestra". The performance was achieved through the not tremendously technical means of assembling 1500 people with cellphones in a room, splitting them into three groups who each downloaded a different musical part, and counting them in by the usual method of someone shouting into a microphone and waving their arms around rhythmically.

A far more interesting attempt at the cellphone orchestra from a year or so ago: Dialtones (A Telesymphony), which we thought was a blast.

During the concert itself, the audience's mobile phones are brought to life by a small group of musicians, who perform the phones en masse by dialing them up with a specially designed, visual-musical software instrument. Because the audience's positions and sounds are known to the Dialtones computer system, the performers can create spatially-distributed melodies and chords, as well as novel textural phenomena like waves of polyphony which cascade across the crowd; these musical structures, moreover, are visualized by a large projection system connected to the performers' interfaces.