Judging from the commercials, an iPhone can be many things to many people. For a musical group at the University of Michigan, it’s an instrument, and not one reserved solely for booty calls.
Students in the Michigan Mobile Phone Ensemble, founded earlier this semester, use their iPhones to put on musical performances. Wednesday marks their finals project concert for what may be the first class ever on using cell phones to make music — beyond ring-tones.
The Michigan Mobile Phone Ensemble
The Ann Arbor engineering professor who masterminded the orchestra and the course got the idea after using his iPhone’s microphone as a wind sensor, essentially turning it into a flute.
After that initial discovery, he experimented with the screen, GPS, wireless sensor and accelerometer, programming them to produce musical notes from touching, tilting or shaking the device.
“The mobile phone is a very nice platform for exploring new forms of musical performance,” said computer scientist and musician Georg Essl, who has dual appointments in Michigan’s engineering and music schools. “We can do interesting, weird, unusual things.”
But while the class may be blazing trails, the mobile phone ensemble is nothing new: cell phone orchestras and symphonies have performed at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif., and at the Helsinki University of Technology in Finland.