MichiganRadio

The Sound of (iPhone) Music ANN ARBOR, MI (Michigan Radio) - 9 college guys in skinny jeans and hoodies stand in a semi-circle on stage. Their hands are on their iPhones, and their eyes are on the conductor. When he gives the cue, they start.

This is the University of Michigan's first Mobile Phone Ensemble, the brainchild of Engineering and Music professor Georg Essl.

Essl teaches a class called, conveniently enough, Building a Mobile Phone Ensemble. The University loans each student an iPhone or iPod touch for the class. For the first part, the students design and build programs that essentially turn their iPhones or iPod touches into pocket-sized musical instruments:

"And then there's the 2nd part; it's not just enough to do the engineering side of it, but actually designing pieces, writing pieces, scripting pieces and putting them on stage and playing."

Creating music on an iPhone is similar to making music on a laptop, except the iPhone is much smaller and much more portable. So you can do more with it. Essl says you can hold the iPhone in your hand and blow into the microphone to create whistle sounds.

"We end up using all these different technologies, we use them and explore how you can do weird, interesting, new, unusual things in terms of building instruments. Because if you just want to have piano, we just play piano. We don't need to reproduce what we already know. We kind of want to find a new thing."

It's just fun to develop something new, something that you can say that you made this sound," explains Colin Neville. Neville created a sound for the class. He calls it the Fuzz Generator.

"A lot of it ends up being noise or completely obnoxious sounds, but it's fun to mess around with it."

Another student, Colin Zyskowski, turned his phone into a portable drum machine.

Devon Kerr created a program that matches audio samples with colors. He calls his composition the Infinitesimal Ballad of ROYGBIV. White has the sort of techno sound, red has a kind of haunting, echo-y feel, blue is kind of poppy and so on.

Kerr has his classmates walk around the stage, flashing their colored iPhone screens toward the audience. Tilt the ipHone screen down, the sound fades, hold it straight up and down, the sound is loud.
All the guys plug in their iPhones to wristband speakers that look like giant cartoon watches.

So they're portable, they're lightweight, easy to manipulate and unlike a piano or guitar or violin, you don't have to worry about your iPhone going out of tune. But like anything with a computer, you do have to worry about your instrument crashing.

Rishi Daftaur created a kind of feedback loop with his iPhone. He is worried some students might not think it's cool to play the iPhone. Daftaur wants them know that's not the case. He says you "can rock out. Whether you get an iPhone or a guitar, if someone wants to express themselves musically creatively, they'll find a way to do it."

If you want to create your iPhone musical instrument, well there's soon to be an app for that. Georg Essel is currently developing one, and he says it will be ready in January.

For more information on the Mobile Phone Ensemble's concert click here.

Contact Jennifer Guerra at guerraj@umich.edu

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