AFTER texting, photomessaging and web surfing, cellphones might soon allow people to improvise music and “jam” together.
The idea is the brainchild of interactivity expert Nick Bryan-Kinns and his colleagues at Queen Mary University of London, who have developed software that lets people call a mobile number and work together to improvise short tunes.
Their software, called daisyphone, looks like a floral join-the-dots puzzle (see Diagram). The tempo of any composition is set by the speed at which an “arm” rotates, like a radar scanner, around the daisy-shaped display. The players choose notes by placing coloured shapes in the…
