Mobile Phone Orchestra/NIME2008
Title of the work
MoPhO: Mobile Phone Orchestra Suite (MoPhOrCC)
Name (composer(s)/artist(s)/performer(s))
- MoPhO directors: Ge Wang, Georg Essl, Henri Penttinen
- composers: Ge Wang, Georg Essl, Jeff Cooper, Henri Penttinen
Institution or company
institution: CCRMA, with support from Deutsche Telekom and Nokia
Address
660 Lomita Dr. Stanford, CA 94305
Email (one e-mail contact per submission)
ge@ccrma.stanford.edu
Year of composition
2008
Duration of performance
16' - 20'
Instrumentation
12 mobile phones (no external amplification)
Narrative description of the work
The Mobile Phone Orchestra is a new repetoire-based ensemble using mobile phones as the primary musical instrument. The MoPhO Suite contains a selection of recent compositions that highlights different aspects of what it means to compose for and perform with such an instrument in an ensemble setting.
Brief program note (250 words max) for inclusion in concert program / proceedings
The Mobile Phone Orchestra of CCRMA (MoPhO) presents an experimental ensemble suite featuring music performed on mobile phones. Far beyond ring-tones, these interactive musical works take advantage of the unique technological capabilities of today's hardware, turning phone keypads, built-in accelerometers, and built-in microphones into powerful and yet mobile chamber meta-instruments.
Artist biographies
The Mobile Phone Orchestra is a new repetoire-based ensemble using mobile phones as the primary musical instrument, founded in 2007/08 at Stanford University by Ge Wang, Georg Essl, and Henri Penttinen.
Georg Essl is currently Senior Research Scientist at Deutsche Telekom Laboratories at TU-Berlin, Germany. He works on mobile interaction, new interfaces for musical expression and sound synthesis algorithms that are abstract mathematical or physical models. After he received his Ph.D. in Computer Science at Princeton University under the supervision of Perry Cook he served on the faculty of the University of Florida and worked at the MIT Media Lab Europe in Dublin before joining T-Labs.
Ge Wang received his B.S. in Computer Science in 2000 from Duke University, PhD (soon) in Computer Science (advisor Perry Cook) in 2007 from Princeton University, and is currently an assistant professor at Stanford University in the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). His research interests include interactive software systems for computer music, programming languages, sound synthesis and analysis, music information retrieval, new performance ensembles (e.g., laptop orchestras) and paradigms (e.g., live coding), visualization, interfaces for human-computer interaction, interactive audio over networks, and methodologies for education at the intersection of computer science and music. Ge is the chief architect of the ChucK audio programming language and the Audicle environment. He is a founding developer and co-director of the Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk), and a co-creator of the TAPESTREA sound design environment. Ge composes and performs via various electro-acoustic and computer-mediated means.