Tchaikovsky's 1812 overture reconstructed from 1000 cellphones, 2000 text alerts (video)
By Thomas Ricker 
posted October 23rd 2009 5:33AM
posted October 23rd 2009 5:33AM
We're suckers for a well done ad but this, this is simply amazing. Vodafone NZ's Symphonia features 1000 cellphones syncing 53 different ringtone alerts from 2000 sent messages to reconstruct Tchaikovsky's 1812 overture. We dare you to not be impressed. See how they did it after the break.
[Thanks, Brent R.]
[Thanks, Brent R.]
Odd, my phone can play that piece better than any of those...
probably... but how boring would it be to have a wall containing one phone playing the overture... and it wouldnt be much of an orchestra
They should ave gone one step further and have the phones light up a graphic, as well. Almost looked like it was about to do that mid-way.
Remember Remember the Fifth of November.
V
The Gunpowder Treason and Plot...
I see no reason why gunpowder treason
CCCCCCOMBO BREAKER
my birthday is the fifth of november
HAHA.........ahhh oh I'm still laughing, I had pretty much assumed that the next post would say "Should ever be forgot." or something....that caught me off guard so much..oh HOOPER that made my day
My god. Imagine the radiation emanating from that wall. Does he hate his testicles? His brain?
thats what i was thinking.. anyone see those videos where they pop, pop corn with around 6 cell phones.. and here they're using 1000.
Yes, but he seems he was standing far enough to be safe, mobile radiation is very short ranged.
And think of the electricity required to perform this stunt and the CO2 generated. Nokia's adverts are killing polar bears.
@LondonConsultant - I can't be certain, but I'm reasonably sure that big Vodafone logo at the end means it's not a Nokia advert.
...yeah because nobody would have ever used those 1000 cell phones if it weren't for this commercial. and nobody sends text messages... and somehow the batteries spew CO2
Unless you're implying that he was simply cooked by the microwaves, I'm pretty sure cell phones can't do any damage since it's non-ionizing radiation.
So that's what they do with all those old phones.
rocks
I guess it's clever and interesting once. Then you see it on NZ TV every single ad break for a week (of which there are many), and you just want to claw your eyes out to make it stop.
Especially when its oh-so-precise timing reminds you that, in real life, Vodafone's SMS network is pathetic... where txts can arrive up to a day and a half later (personal experience), or you send one txt and the recipient gets between 2-4... I'm glad I'm using TXT2K and don't really care if Vodafone's charging for those extra, erroneous txts...
In their defence, their performance has become much much better over the last few months. Too bad it took them 4 years and a couple of new competitors to fix it.
/rant
Apart from that, the idea and implementation is quite impressive, from a technical point-of-view. Flashy lights are always cool :)
I'd like to know more about how this was made. The making of vids are weaksauce.
Cool none the same.
nonetheless?
Best avatar pic ever!
There is no QoS on sending a SMS. So there is no timing relieability on WHEN it will receive the SMS message.
They tricked by doing this when everyone was sleeping (01AM-06AM) so the have the whole network for themselves and by having a Vodaphone engineer "guru" onboard to send the messages.
Nothing like this done before? http://www.flong.com/projects/telesymphony/
Yeh but that sounded terrible
@Scottish Dan
And this didn't :P
There's a big difference between the two. The one that you linked to required custom ringtones to be downloaded to each phone. This one used all standard ringtones. Plus, the one you linked used actual phone calls, whereas this video used text messages; text messages don't come through as reliably as phone calls, so this was definitely a harder performance
Uhm... in the making of the Vodaphone commercial, you can see that Jol, who's putting it all together, is actually recording custom tones of the timpani, horns etc, so it's NOT using basic ringtones.
Watch the first making of video, and you'll see.
It was amazing the first time and the second time and the third but then after a few days..... ahhhhh
Lucky I have MySky. Skipping all the ads is wonderful.
In the US can you use TiVo without affecting your broadband?
Back in NZ we only got it with Telecom and there speeds are pretty poor. I switched to Orcon and only got a measly 25GB.
The quicktime recording in the making-of vids sounded good. The actual thing... not so much. I wonder if they just sat the camera and mic back for the whole video if it would have sounded better than blazing certain phones in the mic up close. Amazing achievement tho.
This would make a great flash mob thing, everybody meets up at one point and gets called and then bam! a mobilephonular ochestrated music from like one guy with 2 phones.
"We dare you to not be impressed."
I'm not impressed. That didn't sound like 1000 cellphones playing the 1812 overture via ringtones, that sounded like 1000 cellphones occasionally playing samples from the 1812 overture randomly.
It sounds much better in the making of videos.
Was anyone else expecting the 1812 Overture, and not a bunch of cuts? Lame.
I am with you. I was expecting at least the finale of the 1812 Overture, but what is in the final cut of this video is barely recognizable as that piece. Totally disappointed.
Nerds are over taking the world!!!
I want to see them accomplish the same using AT&T's network. Trying to play the intro to Super Mario would probably be crippling.
Not to mention it would cost $1,200.
And what exactly did they prove with this?
Right, that there are plenty of people with too much time at hand out there?
Or that in the marketing business you can do lots of money by doing pointless stuff and then claim that you're being 'creative'?
Sure, the idea of this sounds funny.
But somebody actually doing it just seems ridiculous to me ...
lame. so lame.
I think i just 200+ rads from watching this. I'm gonna go drink up some RadAway before the Minor Rad Poisoning starts kicking in
Maybe if they stopped playing symphonies and spent a bit more time on their account management and billing systems (have you EVER tried working with these guys - serious arse/elbow issues) then maybe I'd be a bit more receptive to their adverts!
the guy wanted to do it with iPhones oririginally but was told by AT&T that' the tower technology necessary to pull this thing off has not yet been invented.
If anyone believes this is done for real, I've got a bridge to sell you.
Lots of similar things have been done in the past, like the microwave "ding" Christmas thing from a year or two back. It's special effects. And then they put together these "making of" videos to make it look like they did something really amazing and impressive.
I work with ad agencies all the time, this is one of the oldest tricks in the book to generate attention.
If they faked it, the song would have at least sounded recognizable.
Despite the fact that these guys are trying to sell me something I don't want with this add, it still brought a big, dumb grin to my face. :)
1. What a waste of time.
2. I do not believe they were successful at doing this. They faked the end recording. Though the recording has some poorly synchronized phones, there are not that many. Surely there would be many more out of sync. It would take 6.7 seconds to activate all 1000 phones (at 150 texts/sec.). Then there's the differences in timing on different phones. Lots of the phones looked like they were junked.
welsh engineer +WIN
Very nice project :)
Does anyone know what kind of camera that was, that they used to film the commercial? All I saw was "ASR", but I could be wrong....
Very Cool! Reminded me of the scene from Electric Dreams where Miles' pager goes off in the concert.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYnrmg2Cf_Q&feature=PlayList&p=8D693611BDE8F6B6&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=81#
7:48+