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electro music weirdness

Last night I joined a group of folks over at pyramind for a little show n' tell. A demonstration of the new features of MaxMSP took up most of the evening, and a few lightning talks ensued. One of the talks was from Craig Latta about a smalltalk based livecoding project which resembled early text based adventure games. Craig pulled up a terminal window and began typing commands in natural language that ended up in a simple sequence with a kickdrum, high hat and a note or two. Ge Wang was up next, and gave a demo of his mobile phone orchestra (video below). In the initial frame in the video it's Ge Wang in front of the projector with a phone, the two guys in the back both have phones. Later in the video I pan over to another guy to the right, and another to the left making a total of five people in the orchestra. I'm not entirely sure what was going on to make those strange sounds, but I believe that when Ge was signaling a number with his hand everyone in the "orchestra" would hit the appropriate number on their phone which would result in a new tone. It kind of reminded me of monks...