You know the drill: you’re in a meeting, in a church, in a movie. You have inadvertently forgotten to silence your cell phone and of course, it rings. Not only does it ring, but you have a real classy ring tone like Sir Mix-a-Lot. Usually this would result in either total and utter embarrassment or a real sly move where you join in the disapproving looks and pretend the cell phone that’s disrupting the audience isn’t yours (this method works best in a dark movie theater). This scenario is bound to happen to all of us at least once in any number of places. The place it will not happen, though, is at Dialtones: A Telesymphony.

Per the Flong website:
Dialtones is a large-scale concert performance whose sounds are wholly produced through the carefully choreographed ringing of the audience’s own mobile phones. Before the concert, participants register their mobile phone numbers at a series of web terminals; in exchange, new ringtone melodies are automatically transmitted to their phones, and their seating assignment tickets are generated. During the concert, the audience’s phones are dialed up by live performers, using custom software which permits as many as 60 phones to ring simultaneously. Because the exact location and tone of each participant’s mobile phone is known in advance, the Dialtones concert is able to present a diverse range of unprecedented sonic phenomena and musically interesting structures, such as waves of polyphony which cascade across the audience.

Mind you, this isn’t really anything new, but I recently discovered it and it is, therefor, new to me. Personally, I might go absolutely nuts if I were at this production. But, hey, that’s just me. What about you – is this something you’d attend?