The Stanford Mobile Phone Orchestra’s performance used the Apple iPhones amplified by speakers attached to small fingerless gloves.In one piece, two performers blew into their phones to stir virtual wind chimes. In another, the instruments took on personalities based on the pitch, volume and frequency of the notes played — as if the musicians were flirting, teasing and admonishing each other. And the audience in delight, disobeyed instructions to put away their phones, and pulled them out out to record the performance.

The Stanford Mobile Phone Orchestra, with avant-garde compositions and electronic renditions of popular songs like Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven,” pushes the frontiers of the forty year field of computer music.

Where computer music composers once spent hours programming giant mainframes to synthesise a single sound, advances in hardware and software bring powerful and easy-to-use music tools to the PC and now to smartphones.

Ge Wang,(left) the assistant professor of music who leads the two-year-old Stanford group, says the iPhone may be the first instrument — electronic or acoustic — that millions of people will carry in their pockets. “I can’t bring my guitar or my piano or my cello wherever I go, but I do have my iPhone at all times,” he said.




Professor Wang would like to democratise the process of making music, so that anyone with a cellphone could become a musician. “Part of my philosophy is people are inherently creative,” he said. To pursue that goal, he co-founded a software company Smule,which makes applications that turn iPhones into simple musical instruments. Although the consumer apps are less sophisticated than the custom creations of the Stanford orchestra, users have been fascinated by them.

The most popular Smule app, Ocarina, turns the iPhone into a flutelike instrument played by blowing across the microphone, touching virtual finger holes and tilting the phone. Another Smule app mimics a trombone. The two programs,costing 99 cents each, have been downloaded about 2m times.

A mobile phone orchestra at the University of Michigan, led by a co-founder of the Stanford group performed  recently and a big-band 20 piece jazz group called Large Ensemble led by John Hollenbeck (right) used smartphones as instruments during a New York performance

"Among the sources of sound were English horn, marimba, glockenspiel, crotales (small, tuned, bell-like sets of cymbals played with mallets), digital loop machine and smartphones.... For the final section, first in a slow, pastoral ensemble passage then breaking off in parts to produce short, birdlike phrases. (Those who weren’t playing took out their phones instead, activating the voice-recording function for an as-yet unclear purpose.)

Eventually, the phrases mashed together and became one bar-length phrase, repeated and aggressive, an unbroken steamroller; and as that abated, the phones, held up to the microphones, replayed the original bird-song phrases in a faint, disjointed echo, all other sound fading away....too logical and beautiful to be funny."

Apple it is pointed out  is looking at alternative ways for people to store and play their digital music, the company has agreed to buy Lala,  a four-year-old start-up based in Palo Alto, California

Lala lets users play the music they own from the Web, or cloud. If Apple introduces its own cloud-based streaming music service, it would let people skip having to download music they buy or synchronise music collection between their computers and mobile devices.

A personal music library would always be available on Web, accessible on a PC, smartphone or other Web-connect mobile device. Music to read e-books by perhaps?