Maybe I Should Sleep.

WE INTERRUPT THIS NERD BLOG FOR A BABY HIPPO.

The University of Michigan is using iPhones to create a new form of music.  Check it out!

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The Michigan Mobile Phone Ensemble is one of several university orchestras that has foregone traditional instruments in favour of music applications, downloaded on to Apple’s iPhone, to play songs.

The musicians took a course at the university, entitled “Building a mobile phone ensemble” and learned how to create instruments on their iPhone. The instruments are played using a combination of gestures, including tapping the touch-screen and blowing in to the microphone.

The instruments also use the phone’s built-in GPS, digital compass and accelerometer, which knows which way round the device is being held, to produce a certain note depending on whether it is being tipped or shaken.

The iPhones are attached to speakers, worn around the musicians’ wrists, and the instruments produce a combination of familiar and unusual sounds.

Georg Essl, the computer scientist and accomplished musician who taught the course, said iPhone music was still “in its infancy”.

“But it’s a hot and growing area to use iPhones for artistic expression,” he said. “The mobile phone is a very nice platform for exploring new forms of musical performance. We’re not tethered to the physics of traditional instruments. We can do interesting, weird, unusual things.

“To make technology interesting, you also have to engage with the musicality.”

One of the techniques used by the students is to turn the iPhone’s microphone in to a wind sensor. Players can blow into the microphone, much as they would a flute, to produce ‘sounds’ using iPhone music apps such as Ocarina.

The Michigan Mobile Phone Ensemble is one of several orchestras using iPhones to make music – there are similar groups at Stanford University in the United States, and at colleges in Germany and Finland.