NewsWorks: New App to Weave Philadelphia Voices into Symphony Music

By Peter Crmmins. 
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The Philadelphia Orchestra has commissioned a new piece of music, to feature the voice of you.

Everybody in Philadelphia is invited to download a mobile app to his or her phone, and use it to record anything they want, then upload it to a server. That sound will be used to make a new symphonic composition to be performed next spring.

​Composer Tod Machover calls his crowd-sourced pieces "City Symphonies." He works at MIT in Boston to find new ways to use technology to connect people to music. With the MIT Media Lab and Drexel Uiversity's ExCITe Center, he has created not just an app that allows users to make recordings and submit them, but also easy-to-use plug-ins to manipulate sound according to its inherent tonal qualities.
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"You'll be able to talk or sing into it and it will pull up 20 other people whose voices have a quality similar to yours," said Machover, whose enthusiasm seems heightened by his flyaway hair. "Or, it might have a bunch of orchestral instruments, and as you talk and the instruments color your voice."

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