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Dialtones - A Telesymphony
1337g writes "For once there's a use for those annoying ringing mobile phones during a concert. The entire Dialtones concert was performed by the ringing of the audience's mobile phones. The site shows how they pulled it off, and even gives a few samples of the concert."
"Turn off those damn phones! Er..nevermind..."
nbfn
867-5309?
This behaviour has got to stop. Do what I did - walk out and demand your money back.
Free Java games for your phone: Tontie, Sokoban
As if we needed any more evidence that some people have too much time on their hands... As least they showed some ingenuity in turning a major annoyance into an art form. What's next, an gallery of spam art?
What happens when a person listening has their cell phone go off, but it is set to vibrate? Is that their cue to say, "chirp-chirp"?
I wish they'd make cell phones with little bells in them, so they could sound like phones did 25 years ago. Those bells are much more pleasent than today's "chirp-chirp"!
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
There are some MP3s on the site (Holding up so far..)
This is actual music. It contains actual melodic lines and stuff. Neat.
TODO: Something witty here...
"player 4 hit player 1 with 0 stroms"
as long as it was done after 7pm on a weekday or on the weekend...otherwise all the people who were roaming to see the concert were screwed...
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
I hate to break it to you, but that isn't exactly the 'ding-a-ling' Chuck was thinking about...
TODO: Something witty here...
I've only gotten through the first 2 mp3s on their site, but you can hear someone coughing during the performance...
"Shut up so I can hear the phone!"
I am first chair in the symphonic, I was simply rehearsing!
LETS DECOMPOSE & ENJOY ASSEMBLING
they'll be arrested.
My new cellphone (alcatel 511) has polyphonic ring tones - you get the whole symphony of electronic noise instead of just the beep-beep noise. The only problem (aside from having to do away with my Pinky and the Brain ring tone) is that I never realise it's my phone ringing because it sounds like some electronic toy... I'm conditioned to hear the beep-beep mono instead.
ah well. Technology 1: Audent 0
I am a leaf on the wind
What would happen if someone really tried to call you?? Would people get mad if you were talking to someone on you cellphone during a...cellphone concert??
Weird thoughts ebb and flow in a mind this empty.
Like pi? Try 10,000 digits.
If you thought hearing one cell phone ring was enough to make you go mad, then you might want to head over to the site and listen to some of the MP3s they have. 20 cell phones going off simultaneously, its enough to make anybody go crazy. It does sound kinda cool tho.
In high school (years ago for me now), we had a computer lab of about 25 machines. A friend and I got the whole lab to play a song using a simple program, written in either BASIC or Pascal. (I forget which)
Each machine had and endless loop checking for the existance of a file representing a musical note on a network drive. When found, if assigned to play that note, the machine would play the note until the file disapeared. Each machine was assigned a note. Each note had more than one PC assigned to it around the lab.
We were able to entertain ourselves, as well as anyone walking through the lab, for at least an hour tinkering with the end resulting music.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
I bet at least one person just sat there saying "Would someone turn that damn phone off!"
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Each member of the audience will inhale nanobots that will trigger coughing at precise moments to produce a coughing concert.
That sounds a lot like the lecture theatres where I study. People just won't switch their phones off, even in spite of big "No cell phones" signs.
Next time I'm in a lecture I'll try and appreciate the artistic quality of the phones. Though I suspect I'll have a hard time convincing the professor up the front.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
If a beeper went off, would that be inconsiderate?
---- *dog sitting next to a computer, with his beady eyes shifting left to right*
...except for the person in the background getting a physical.
Of course, if the nurse administering the physical is strategically using a vibrating phone, well then, oh yeah!
Yes I did, and they annoyed the hell out of me.
awesome!
I'm not one to support Big Brother tactics, but I believe that every cellphone should have a chip that automatically detects when it's in a place like a theater or whatever, and when that happens, it should go into vibrate mode or something like that. Obviously, this should be a setting that the user can change or override because, like I said, Big Brother SUCKS! DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER!!!
Well, I got off the topic... Where was I? Oh yeah, this is the STUPIDEST thing I've ever heard BECAUSE it promotes and advocates those annoying pieces of SH|T ringing all over the place, when they should be quiet. There's nothing that pisses me off more than seeing some a$$hole in one of those UGLY BMW SUVs, the ugliest things on the road, by the way, holding a cell phone up to his ear. (By the way, SUV stands for STUPID, UGLY, VEHICLE)
Note they used Linux on the server that ran the ordeal.
I put on my robe and wizard hat.
Yea, I listened to it for a minute and I have to vote "no" on this one.
A whole bunch of phones in one place, a local transmitter, hundreds, if not thousands of calls per minute...
Hrm, guess we found another way to research cell phone induced cancer rates...
- Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero.
I'd rather listen to RMS singing the free software song than this piece of pseudo art.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
I'm always suprised when somebody tries to judge what is or isn't art. Can't art just be whatever somebody wants to call "art"? No, a cellphone concert is not particularly deep, nor is it likely to change civilization. I think it's great simply because it happened -- it's bizarre to have even considered doing it in the first place, and then to actually have it work and sound interesting is icing on the cake. Don't look too deep in order to decide if something is art. Just appreciate the fact that it exists, even when it annoys the hell out of you.
I hate to break it to you, but everyone knew that.
all you naysaying trolls on this thread ought to listen to a few of the MP3 files. it sounds really neat, and the amount of thought and preparation that went into this performance is impressive. It's hard to do something really new and unique (and relevant) in art or electronic music, and these folks have done it. i look forward to the CD.
of the time i saw this on the discovery channel over a year ago!
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Web Developer II
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
...For once there's a use for those annoying ringing mobile phones during a concert....
You've got to hand it to them. They actually found something *more* annoying than a ringing cell phone.
::.. check out some Cell Phone Reviews
- always
something!This happened a while ago... Not exactly breaking news. I saw Golan Speak in Ann Arbor, MI a few months ago. He did a performance with his visualization studio. If you ever get a chance to see him, he's a pretty cool guy.
Contrary to what many apparently believe, this isn't the first time cellphones have been used to represent "a symphony". Ever hear a mobile phone play the 1812 overture in the middle of a watching a movie or a play?
It's actually highly realistic...if the owner of the phone continues to let the it ring for long enough, the sound of gunshots fired by disgruntled moviegoers is just like the sound of cannons being fired in the real song!
I've heard part of the performance... It's not just the noise that one might think it would be. They downloaded unique ringers into everyone's phone and created ordered melodies and rhythms. (this happened in europe where being able to download ring tones is more the norm and not the exception) It was very cool, and I really think you'd need to hear it to really appreciate it... /me shrugs
Here's happy birthday, ;)
1121321121631196321332121
I once heard stair way to heaven on the phone - that was back in the day when blue boxing was still around and an exiting friday night meant being on a conference call with 30 other phreaks.
There already is spam art!!!! http://google.blogspace.com/archives/000458.html
Heil Sig! -Rob
Score:-3, Lazy AssMonkey
"The saddest words of mice and men, are not those which were, but should have been."
Just when I think the limits of chiptunes can't be pressed any farther. Commodore and Amiga fans rejoyce!
Of the four tracks available, only tele1530.mp3 sounded like music in my sense. The rest was either modem-connect-tone-ish patterns or the soundtrack to the end of "The Lawnmower Man." But the 1530 track was pretty cool indeed. I'm not sure I would have enjoyed this concert though, very high pitched and rather random from what I can tell.
Etc, etc, ad nauseam, and so on and so forth.
That must have been a pain to get the timing down right. I could have a full signal on my cell and still get "tick...tick....tick...tick" when I try to call someone.
Makes you wonder if that transceiver wasn't giving everyone a brain tumor.
How could they time this properly? I know that there is a relatively long, varying delay between when the phone is dialed, and when the phone eventually rings. Just wondering...
I was in the audience and was enjoying quite a bit. However, some woman behind me kept playing her violin.
On top of that, the first few minutes of the performance caused a panic. Too many people switched their phones in vibrate mode upon entering the theatre (habit, I suppose). The resulting shockwave as the symphony began caused part of the building to collapse.
I did listen to them, as I pointed out above...
How to tell it's a slow day on Slashdot:
a) no new Microsoft security holes
b) a freakin' cell phone concert?!?!
Fuckin-A
I listened to tele2330.mp3 and there is some major bass going on there... i find it hard to believe a cell phone speaker could put that out, so is there any chance this was augmented with other instruments?
...by some guy who had an extra mobile phone that played the "Mission Impossible" Theme half way through... ...And then there were the other's whose phones immediately forwarded to message bank... ...And let's not forget those who had their phones set to vibrate:
BEEP! BEEP!-BAH! BEEP!-BEEP!-BEEP!-BEEP!-BEEP! bzzzz
Being a computer music composer/researcher, I am just annoyed I didn't think of something like this first!
This really is an excellent idea. One problem you have with electronic installations and concerts are things like sound spatialization. Some ways musicians combat this is to set up 12 channel sound systems with the speakers distributed around the entire hall so you can hear hear music moving around in a real 3D space, or they use projected speakers to pin-point sound into certain areas. But hey why use your own speakers when most the population carries a speaker in their pocket!
The performer would have known the phone number for every mobile in the hall, plus he would know the location of each phone. Just imagine a wave of dial tones moving across from one side of the hall to the other, sweeping up and down, pinpointing to one point in the hall, and then spreading out in a random spread across the hall. This really is cool. I wish I was there. You would probably have to experience something like this live to really appreciate it.
And for anyone who thinks this is weird, you need to get out more often. I have been to concerts where the audience were given bubble wrap, and the piece consisted of the audience popping it - oooh fun!
Saying your OS is the best because more people use it is like saying MacDonalds make the best food
Now I have to listen to Electronic Meditation, Atem and Zeit...
oh well there goes my night sleep...
Zombie tomorrow...
it made me want to stab myself in the eyes and light my hair on fire
i feel so much dumber for having seen something on it
Casual Games/Downloads
You can download it (sorry its a Win32 ripping tool) with this:Streambox VCR v1.0 beta 3.1 http://www.afterdawn.com/software/audio_software/
A direct link to the download is here: http://dl2.afterdawn.com/StreamBox!VCR.zip 674 KB (689,180 bytes)
And to get the video stream go here: rtsp://www.aec.at/symposium2001/Dialtones_fin12.r
Just an FYI, the music kind of sucks. Does anyone know what the fuck they were trying to play? It sounds like a bunch of crickets and crap. If I had to sit through this I would have died of boredom.
If anyone knows how to jack
Here is some information from the site regarding the ripping software:
Parsons School of Design (NYC)...
Old newz.
that's funny as all hell man ;)
i'll pay that!
...cos their coverage sucks! the concert would be a long moment of silence.
there's no place like ~
'I am the orchastrator with my pocket calculator'
;)
Just imagine the fun they could have today
Natty
Maybe the rain Isn't really to blame. So I'll remove the cause, But not the symptom!
For every nerd that thinks this is really cool (myself included) - there's a symphony weenie that just shit his pants in disbelief.
Speaking of the symphony...got a quick little story. I was at the symphony a few months ago in the best seats (other than Loge Boxes). Now I'm not an old guy - in my 20's - so I kind of snicker when I see these two older couples obviously snooping around, and sneaking into the seats next to my date and I. At intermission an usher comes over and kindly asks to see their tickets. It was hilarious seeing these 65+ year old couples, who were obviously loaded, get kicked out of the symphony like they were at some sporting event. Nothing left to do but hang your head in shame and drive home in your $100,000 Mercedes, I guess.
Witness this Andy Warhol classic. Or how about this creative abuse of Google's search-term highlight facility?
Or did you mean email spam?
What's interesting is that these SPAM and spam art links are very similar in overall concept to the cellphone ringer art -- take some banal aspect of modern existance and extrapolate some artistic absurdity from it. I love it!
--JoeProgram Intellivision!
There's a million problems in the world that people with this amount of intelligence could be solving, and instead they're making cell phones play music.
evil adrian
This immediately made me think of the "Boom Box" experiments that The Flaming Lips were doing a few years ago -- they would hand out boom boxes and cassettes to 40 or so members of the audience. Each cassette would contain different mixes of the same song. When all 40 tapes were played at the same time it would create a spacial effect, but also the tape players would wobble in and out of sync with each other creating a temporal effect as well. On top of this, the band members would "orchestrate" the piece by signalling people to turn up or down the volume on their tape player. One place to read more about it is here.
You can download it (sorry its a Win32 ripping tool) with this:Streambox VCR v1.0 beta 3.1 http://www.afterdawn.com/software/audio_software/
A direct link to the download is here: http://dl2.afterdawn.com/StreamBox!VCR.zip 674 KB (689,180 bytes)
And to get the video stream go here: rtsp://www.aec.at/symposium2001/Dialtones_fin12.r
Just an FYI, the music kind of sucks. Does anyone know what the fuck they were trying to play? It sounds like a bunch of crickets and crap. If I had to sit through this I would have died of boredom.
If anyone knows how to jack
Here is some information from the site regarding the ripping software:
Here's happy birthday [...]
Busted. That's a derivative work of a copyrighted song published by AOL. Go to jail, go directly to jail, do not pass go, do not collect $200.
Will I retire or break 10K?
A few years ago Flaming Lips frontman Wayne Cohen thought of the "Parking Lot Experiments" -- he created a symphony with each instrument recorded on a single tape. Then he had a group of forty people with cars that had tape players show up to his parking lot and he would "conduct" them.
Something similar could be found a few years later in the Lips' release of Zaireeka a 4-disc set that is meant to be played simultaneously.
At least that's what popped into my mind when I read this.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
How about the water drip concherto?
Or construction equipment rythem?
Or the commercial "commercial" swing section?
I'd like to lock those pesky telemarketers to the wall and make them listen to that for a while.
But, we really know they are all behind it... people giving out their cell phone numbers for a "concert", ha!
Did anyone tell them to expect a phone call for them to purchase magazines tomorrow, at dinner time?
At first it sounded completely ridiculous, but I tried to keep an open mind anyway. At one point it even crossed my mind that this might actually be cool; then I listened to those MP3s on the site. What a pathetic waste of time. Just when I thought it couldn't get any lamer, they put on sounds of an amplified phone on vibrate mode. You can't get much lamer than this.
It would be cool to get some cell phones all with the same dial tune and try to make a round out of them. Polyphonic Telephonic?
"dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope"
Somewhere, Lawrence Fishburn had a conniption, and doesn't know why.
(for the uncultured masses, Fishburn once screamed at an audience member whose phone rang during one of his scenes in a broadway play.)
...that somebody heard a cellphone ringing and thought "Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those."
Virtue finds and chooses the mean.
Aristotle, Ethica Nichomachea
Not to pick nits, but shouldn't it have been called the ringtones concert?
Better yet, as a piece performed by ringtones, it could just be called a "ringpiece."
... can't ... resist ...
a beowulf cluster of mobile phones!
The Official Steve Ballmer Webpage
I dunno about you but I'd love to hear a room full of cellphones play John Cage's 4'33" (4 mins 33 seconds of silence).
I totally dug the shimmering effect from the first sound bit.
That last bit with the amplified vibrating phone cracked me up, though. I kept getting visions of some kind of large animal..., possibly a rhinoceros. The connection to Saint-Saens "Carnival of the Animals" ("Carnival of the Cell Phones"?) is irresistable.
Anyway, I thought it was a pretty nifty idea. New art is nearly always interesting, if almost never lasting.
So do the makers of the mobile phones own the distinctive sounds being made by these phones?
If this becomes amazingly popular, are they entitled to sue the creators for stealing music?
How long before other instrument makers start demanding performers pay royalties?
Digital mdeia is the quantum physics of law.
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
I can play the *whole* of Shakira's 'Whenever, Wherever' on a DTMF telephone keypad, and it sounds really good.
:-(.
Unfortunately, before you ask, I cannot post the digits here, because it would risk action by the RIAA for copyright infringement
What happens when a person listening has their cell phone go off, but it is set to vibrate?
Hey, they could use vibrate mode for the bass! ^o^
They should make a mobile phone with both a speaker and a transducer, one you could download .wav files to. If you want vibrate mode, use a .wav with nothing but low-frequency noise. If you want realistic-sounding bell tones, that would work, too.
How about it, Nokia?
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Just to point out thar the first 3 notes (112) are the new international standard emergency number.
Might be a good idea not to try it while the phone is connected to the network.
I hope that this guys realiase what they just did.
This is a flagrant violation of copyright.
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
The examples they have on their site sound terrible.
It sounded like... a bunch of cell phones all ringing at once. The "solo performances" sounded a *little* better, just to be joined back up again by the mess of all the other noises again.
I just don't see what is special about making cell phones ring at the same time. Call me cultureless. Or something.
I was much more impressed by a live set someone did on a 980Khz Commodore 64 at Assembly '02. (You can get all the demos and videos of Asm'02 at scene.org)
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Sounds a lot like the previously reported dot matrix symphony a while back. Interesting, but an acquired taste.
HELLO?? yeah i'm in a concert......yeah......no.......bye!
(/. lameness filter took out all the caps)
> If anyone knows how to jack .asx, .asf, .wmf, .rm and .ram files in *nix, let me know!
>
MPlayer (http://www.mplayerhq.hu/) can handle asf/wmv.
As for rm/ram/mov, well... they suck anyway.
We have less people mangled by SUV driving, cell phone using idiots.
Damn us all! I wanted to drive into the back of a truck while trying to make a call!
(or whichever carrier it is) Standing in the back of the auditorium.. "CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW? HOW ABOUT NOW?"
Relive the BBS Past - One Byte at a Time! www.ssabbs.com
How can you make art out of one of the most annoying sounds in existence?
In Frank Zappa's book, he answers the old 'what is art' question by saying (misquoted from memory) "when someone creates something and declares it to be art, then he has created art, and has become an artist".
Of course, no one has to agree with any artist that is is good art, or that there is any point to it.
---
"I can't complain, but sometimes still do..." Joe Walsh
Ever heard of: "You're getting old and showing it."
Got a lovely reminder of this yesterday in the dentist chair reminising with my hygenist about Bobby Charleton and the England squad of '66.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
MPlayer is a credit to the GNU/Linux community, and Joel Barr can go bite himself.
KMSMA (WWBD?)
(crotchety old fogey voice)
Sit down around my feet youngsters and let me tell yer a tale of REAL hacking.
My school's IBM 1130 (size of a large desk, power of a pocket calculator) put out so much RF that you could place a transistor radio (Remember those? Nope? Didn't think so) on top of the CPU and when certain combinations of i/o were run would play music from the radio.
he he he , good old days....
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
I have used phones within the last 3 years from EVERY MAJOR CARRIER. Sprint PCS has the BEST network. BEST PHONES (I got the Sanyo 4900 and LOVE IT!).
If you want crap coverage try one of the many others..
Well, you used Google, which is more than the typical lazy 'Ask Slashdot' cunt can be bothered to do.
www.stockhausen.org
"Don't worry, it's not loaded." --Terry Kath
//////////// Some ways musicians combat this is to set up 12 channel sound systems with the speakers distributed around the entire hall so you can hear hear music moving around in a real 3D space ////////////
Are you kidding me ? The phasing problems coming off of the PA would be enormous. It would sound like shit. Like most overly academic dope smoking music does. //////////
And for anyone who thinks this is weird, you need to get out more often. I have been to concerts where the audience were given bubble wrap, and the piece consisted of the audience popping it - oooh fun! //////////
I hope you are not paying money for this and putting real musicians/performance artists out of work. Think of your environmental consequences for Chris Sake ?
Think moronically act globally ? Think smurfily act locally ?
sigh
Yeah, there were similar programs for the PDP-8 that generated music by RF on a transistor radio placed on console desk.
Did the IBM 1130 only play the [big] blues?
Art challenges the status quo. Entertainment supports the status quo.
Touche ashi.
But showing one's age isn't a *bad* thing, is it? I thought one of the benefits of getting old was being allowed to yell "HEY YOU KIDS GET OUTTA MY FRONT YARD!" and "THESE PUNKASS WHIPPERSNAPPERS DON'T KNOW HOW GOOD THEY'VE GOT IT NOWADAYS".
Ohmigod I'm shorter of breath and one day closer to death. Thanks for the existential lesson.
You could do this just by using a few big speakers, plonking them in a massive hall, and using granular synthesis.
Now, could the same team please arrange for end to end mobile phone performances of John Cage's 4'33" alongside the main program at the next concert I go to?
(Quite seriously, I'm impressed by this, even if it isn't "great" art.)
Chapter 2: Newtonian Growth and Decay
The growth-decay formulas were developed in the trivial fashion by
Isaac Newton's famous brother Phigg. His idea was to provide an equation
that would describe a quantity that would dwindle and dwindle, but never
quite reach zero. Historically, he was merely trying to work out his
mortgage. Another versatile equation also emerged, one which would define
a function that would continue to grow, but never reach unity. This equation
can be applied to charging capacitors, over-damped springs, and the human
race in general.
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