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Georg Essl, new faculty member with a joint appointment at the School of Music, Theatre & Dance?Performing Arts Technology (PAT)?and Computer Science is making inroads into a brand new field: creating music with mobile phones.

Georg, who grew up in Austria, first got the bug when his physicist father bought a computer?a Commodore Vic-20?for the family in the mid-1980s. ?I was just fascinated,? he says. By the time he was at Princeton working on his Ph.D., his focus was on computer music; four years ago it shifted to mobile phones. ?It became obvious to me that these are good platforms to make noise with because they are great at playing and recording audio,? Essl says. ?So I got on this trajectory of taking existing mobile phone technology and trying to see what you can do with them.? The phone can be played like a magic eye, turning light patterns in a room into sound, strummed like a stringed instrument, or?if the user blows into the microphone at the bottom?played like a wind instrument. Sounds can be altered by tilting the phone in different directions.

?Today?s cell phones provide more processing power in the palm of our hand than was every imagined at the dawn of electronic music,? says Mary Simoni, head of PAT. ?Equipped with a microphone, speaker, and processing software, these devices have the essential characteristics of a musical instrument. The transformative work of Georg Essl could unlock unconventional modes of music-making as each person programs his or her cell phone to be a customizable musical instrument.?

Students in his class, Building a Mobile Phone Orchestra, will perform on December 9 at 8:00 in Britton Recital Hall. Because the speaker in the phone is too small for public performances, players wear a small canister-size speaker on each wrist. Don?t expect Mozart. But do come ready to hear the first small steps in a new field with still as yet unrecognized potential.