The Philadelphia Orchestra will perform the work Tuesday at Carnegie Hall. He based the composition on recorded sounds, including the sizzle of a cheesesteak.

(Credit: ​Jessica Griffin/Philadelphia Orchestra)

On Sept. 9, 2015, the Lucerne Festival Academy Orchestra offered the world premiere performance of Tod Machover's Symphony for Lucerne.

Over the course of a year, Machover invited people to use their smart phones to record sounds from around Lucerne. Machover himself returned to the city each month to record conversations, environmental sounds and musical performances. He then assembled the sounds at the MIT Media Lab, where he heads the Opera of the Future group, and incorporated them into his orchestral composition.

The Symphony for Lucerne is very literally meant to represent the sounds of the city, offering an aural portrait as experienced by Lucerne's residents and visitors.

​Listen to the full performance at the top of this page, and hear WQXR's Jeff Spurgeon interview Machover about the project below.

Host Scott Simon talks to MIT professor of music and media Tod Machover about his work with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. He crowdsourced street sounds gathered by local Torontonians and blended them with traditional instruments to create an orchestra.