The London Geek Community iPhone OSCestra performs the Dr. Who theme May 8th at Open Hack London.
Jim Purbrick organized the iPhone orchestra on the spot, using mrmr on the iPhone, and OSCulator and Ableton Live running on his Mac:
After booking a slot for the non-existant iPhone orchestra during the hack demos, I set out to make it exist. With a combination of arm twisting and volunteering I convinced 8 plucky hackers to join the orchestra then spent a few hours auditioning synth patches in Ableton and assiging MIDI controllers to their parameters and tweaking iPhone accelerometer smoothing settings in OSCulator to get a couple of Wiimotes working as drums.
I managed to organise an hour’s rehearsal on Saturday afternoon where we spent the first half trying to connect all of the devices and the second huddled around the laptop trying to hear the audio from the built in speakers. After a bit more tweaking I set up a 3rd Wiimote to launch loops and start and stop the set, allowing me to get in on the fun while conducting and borrowed an amp for our second and final rehearsal.
Adds Purbrick, “It went down a storm with the assembled geeks.”
Like cloning dinosaurs, just because you have the ability to do a thing does not mean the thing should be done. A sense of pitch is always helpful in an "orchestra".
It's too bad that geeks making music get so much more buzz on the Web than musicians making interesting music.
Have any of the circuit benders, iPhone musicians or music hackers that you see on YouTube actually created interesting music?
The iphone orchestra was just a bit of fun and I'm glad it went down well. Some of my more considered music is available here http://www.myspace.com/onehundredrobots and here http://www.myspace.com/vanishingtrick