Monday, October 13, 2008

Date: October 11th, 2008
Location: Wingate institute, Netania, Israel
Event: Geekcon08 - geek conference.
Participants: The Israeli geek community.

Credits:
Dror Gill: Inspiration, gear and video
Mel Rosenbeg: Saxophone
Oded Sharon: Accordeon
Shahar (Person) Eyal: Tech support - keyboards and gear
Eden Shochat, Yuval Tal, Ilan Graicer: The spirit behind Geekcon

What is the Cellular Orchestra project?

20 or more cellular phones playing different ringtones together. If these ringtones are part of a musical piece, the result is very interesting. There are a few problems, though:

  • It's impossible to start all the ringtones together

  • Sometimes there are more than 20 people in the room

  • Different phones have different audio capabilities, in terms of volume and quality



To confront these problems, I composed a musical piece consisting of 26 tracks. I uploaded these tracks randomly to about 60 cellular phones and laptop computers and played them all in one event.

The piece is played in one scale and there are a few melodies going together, to avoid the sync issue.