Dialtones: A Telesymphony

Dialtones, as described on Golan Levin?s web site, “is a large-scale concert performance whose sounds are wholly produced through the carefully choreographed dialing and ringing of the audience’s mobile phones. Because the exact location and tone of each participant’s mobile phone can be known in advance, Dialtones affords a diverse range of unprecedented sonic phenomena and musically interesting structures.”
Preparatory to the concert, members of the audience register their wireless telephone numbers at secure Web kiosks located in the performance space. In exchange for this information, they then receive seating assignment tickets for the concert venue. New “ringtones” are then automatically downloaded to their handsets. During the concert, a small group of musicians perform the phones en masse by dialing them up with a specially designed, visual-musical software instrument. “Because the audience’s positions and sounds are known to the Dialtones computer system, the performers can create spatially-distributed melodies and chords, as well as novel textural phenomena like waves of polyphony which cascade across the crowd; these musical structures, moreover, are visualized by a large projection system connected to the performers’ interfaces. Towards the end of its half-hour composition, Dialtones builds to a remarkable crescendo in which nearly two hundred mobile phones peal simultaneously.”