Dialtones (A Telesymphony) is a large-scale concert entirely made up of the audience’s ringtones. It premiered in 2001 at the Ars Electronica Festival.

 “Because the exact location and tone of each participant's mobile phone can be known in advance, Dialtones affords a diverse range of unprecedented sonic phenomena and musically interesting structures. Moreover, by directing our attention to the unexplored musical potential of a ubiquitous modern appliance, Dialtones inverts our understandings of private sound, public space, electromagnetic etiquette, and the fabric of the communications network which connects us.” 

-from http://www.flong.com/projects/telesymphony/

Unexpected Transformations

We used to think of the phone as a utility piece, and until relatively recently, we used to think of the ringtone as merely performing an alert function. This telesymphony premiered in 2001, when most people expected to hear the Nokia ringtone every time a cellphone goes off. The ringtone was not yet fully explored as a form of expression, so when Golan Levin viewed the cellphone as an instrument and used it to conduct this concert, it shifted the cellphone’s meaning on its side. When these utility pieces are played together, the resulting form is unexpected in its harmony. 

Technical Realization

The technical realization of Dialtones is brilliant. Creating the sound of this concert required input from computer to telephone to audio. The audience registered the make and model of their cellphones through an online portal. That information then gets fed into a custom-built, networked database that could dial up to 60 phones at the same time. Levin and his team took latency into consideration with the timing of the music. The time it takes for someone to dial and for the phone to ring is just a small part of Dialtones’ complex synchronization.

Choreographing the little details is like going from water to gas to liquid. There is a lot to get between those three different forms. They essentially were moving from a keyboard and mouse to a radio wave to an onboard mobile device to audio. That’s not easy. It takes a lot of planning, but when it all works out, it is absolutely beautiful.