Voyage One - Audience Mobile Phone Orchestra Performance

Voyage One is a 6-minute composition for a participatory Mobile Phone Orchestra (MPO) concept developed by the author. The MPO concept is designed to embrace people regardless their musical backgrounds as performers, but still with an aim to generate expressive and meaningful artistic expressions for concert hall performances. In a performance the MPO consist of 20-40 people, divided in 6 individual parts. They perform using their phones, and the dedicated MPO Web-API, as instrument interfaces. Animated notation is showing performance instructions for the 6 individual parts and conducting the performance. Voyage One was composed in 2017, during the early stages of development of the MPO platform. The work is a single movement composition, where 6 individual voices are introduced one after another to slowly build up an orchestral harmonic texture towards a concluding climax. The composition is characterized by extremely tight constraints, where only four pitches are used in each voice, based on the previous conditions of the mobile phone orchestra's instrument interface. The challenge lay in creating musical coherence within this limitation of four pitches per voice by organizing the interaction among the six voices. Voyage One was composed as an initial journey into the unknown where the MPO becomes a metaphor for the collective and the importance of interaction in creating meaning.