After texting, photomessaging, and web surfing, the latest cellphone talent is set to be enabling people to 鈥渏am鈥� together to improvise music, say software engineers in London, UK.
The idea is the brainchild of computer interactivity expert Nick Bryan-Kinns and his colleagues at Queen Mary College. They have developed software that let will groups of people phone into a mobile number and work together to improvise short, looping tunes.
The QMC team hope people will be able to engage with their friends in the same way jazz musicians appear to 鈥渕entally connect鈥� when jamming.
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Their Java-based software, called , looks like a floral join-the-dots puzzle (see picture). Unlike a musical stave鈥檚 horizontal sequence of notes, the daisy鈥檚 circular design 鈥渞einforces the looping nature of the music,鈥� says Bryan-Kinns.
The tempo is set by the speed at which a 鈥榬adar arm鈥� rotates around the daisy. As the arm passes over coloured shapes placed on the dotted petals, musical sound samples 鈥� such as piano, flute or snare drum 鈥� are played.
Gentle curves
Each of four instruments is represented by a different shape, while colour indicates who placed it. Distance from the centre of the daisy indicates pitch and ranges over a couple of octaves. All users can alter anybody else鈥檚 work.
In tests with both adults and teenage users the QMC team found that even people with no musical knowledge can create tunes collaboratively using daisyphone. Most tend to begin by either drawing gentle curves or straight lines on the daisyphone, creating rising or falling note progressions or a stark-sounding chords respectively.
鈥淏ut they soon progress to more complex harmonious curves by trial and error,鈥� Bryan-Kinns says. But he agrees that the process of making a tune can be 鈥渁 bit of a din鈥�.
Tunes can be extended by joining one daisy to another 鈥� users are not limited to one loop. The QMC team hope a cellphone network will see their software as a useful downloadable Java applet.
They stand a fair chance of success: the networks are always looking for new ways to get users to spend more time on the line 鈥� and one firm already likes the sound of QMC鈥檚 idea. 鈥淢aking music this way sounds a brilliant idea,鈥� says Lars Weisswange, a device development expert with the UK鈥檚 O2 mobile network.