Dialtones: A Telesymphony

2003

Golan Levin (US)
Joris Gruber
Gunther Schmidl (AT)

A concert performance in which all of the sounds are wholly produced through the choreographed ringing of the audience’s own cell phones. Dialtones presents a diverse range of unprecedented sonic phenomena and musically interesting structures and inverts our understanding of private sound, public space and electromagnetic etiquette. The performers create spatially-distributed melodies and chords, as well as novel textural phenomena like waves of polyphony which cascade across the crowd; these musical structures are visualized by a large projection system connected to the performers' interfaces. Towards the end of its half-hour composition, the Telesymphony builds to a stunning crescendo in which as many as two hundred mobile phones peal simultaneously.