A cell phone concerto, anyone?

An impromptu concert sometimes happen at The Philippine STAR’s marketing department. During dry days, when little – or no – work is to be done, the people at the Supplement Section slip out their mobile phones from their cases and compare ringtones. One would start with a Five For Fighting crap, then the other would respond with Ghost In You. Another comes in with Are You Gonna Go My Way and then Jimi Hendrix’s Purple Haze. The whole insanity of it quickly grips the whole room and soon everyone is into the act. Voltes V theme, Clint Eastwood of Gorillaz, Mozart, Blue Danube, Beatles – all of them are part of a strange, funky but nevertheless utterly annoying cacophony that almost got everyone a memo.

Like someone hit with a brilliant idea, a bold soul even suggested that we synchronize our cell phones so we could create a whole "symphony" (cacophony won’t be the word for it anymore once we harmonize our tones and alerts). Brilliant. However, other guys already beat us to it.

Golan Levin, an artist, composer and explorer of new modes of audiovisual expression; Scott Gibbons, an electronic music composer; and Greg Shakar, a fellow at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at the New York University where he has created "reactive sound sculptures," got together with stage production manager Jorg Lehner and computer geeks like Yasmin Sohrawardy, Joris Gruber, Gunther Schmidl and Erich Semlak to create the ultimate cell phone concerto.

"Dialtones: A Telesymphony" was staged last Sept. 2 at the Brucknerhaus Auditorium in Linz, Austria as part of the annual Ars Electronica Festival. In a nutshell, it was a large-scale concert performance made possible through the carefully choreographed ringing of the audience’s mobile phones.

How was this done? Before the concert, the participants were made to register their mobile phone numbers and model numbers at special Web-based terminals scattered around the performance venue.

A scripting program assigned a seat to a participant depending on the make and model of his phone. Afterwards, the participant was sent a new ringtone via SMS which would be used in the concert.

After all numbers and model codes have been collected, a special interactive graphical software called each mobile phone in the audience according to a predetermined visual arrangement in the audience grid.

During the performance, a participant was lit up with a white light whenever his handset was sounded. Other members of the audience were bathed in yellow light to indicate that their phones were the next to be dialed. This way, each individual became an audio-visual pixel and the whole audience at once became the orchestra and the score.

According to the event’s website (www.telesymphony.com), Dialtones was staged due to the mobile phone’s potential as a performance instrument. "The buttons make it a keyboard and a remote control," says the website. "Its programmable rings make it a portable synthesizer."

The site adds that while audiences in every modern-day concert are commanded to turn off their phones during performances, a lot of aesthetic possibilities can be discovered by leaving them on.

"Although no sacred place has remained unsullied by the interruptions of ringing mobile phones, there is no sacred place either specifically devoted for its free expression. In the context of this lack, and in the context of our society’s contradictory attitudes toward wireless communication technologies, Dialtones is proposed," the site explains.

Another crazy idea that utilizes mobile phones in the creation of art is "Paintball," an interactive painting project which was also part of the Ars Electronica Festival this year.

In the project, a large white screen was draped over the facade of the University of Art in Austria. Everyone in the public with a cell phone was invited to pitch in by calling a telephone number. Each call triggered a special software which commanded a cannon to fire colored paintballs at the screen. The project went on for several days.