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.