You also made me realize I completely mis-pictured this scene when I read it. (I really loved/love it too.) This is the problem with reading books in a tearing hurry because you just want to find out what happens, little slip-ups in the mind picture. I did not realize that every phone was receiving a different track of the song and moving according to that, rather I thought that the location of their phones was interacting with the Beekeeper server to get them the right track. This is much more pagan.

It reminds me of a little ritual Athenian did last spring when sending off half the juniors to Death Valley for the required 26 days of backpacking. The ceremonial start of the course, dividing the group into three desert-animal-named-patrols (when you found who, exactly, among your classmates you’d be sharing the experience with), has always been rife with tension and expectation, perfect ceremony material. Last spring the instructors tried something new: for each patrol they made a sound associated with its patron animal, very specific and silly. Then they got all the students to stand in a circle. (The rest of the community–schoolmates, teachers, staff, parents) watched from outside the circle. The instructors went around the circle from the outside, blindfolding each student and then whispering the name of their patrol’s animal into their ear. When each student knew their patrol animal and knew their patrol sound, they were all gently pushed into the circle to wander around, quacking/squwaking/growling/whistling or what have you, carefully feeling around until they found each other. Only when all three groups had coalesced into clusters of joyful noise were the blindfolds removed. It was totally awesome to watch; I wish we had done it when I went to the Sierras 15 years ago.

I actually wanted to propose recreating the phone rave as the Scheme spin-off, but I couldn’t even begin to imagine whom to commission, and the sound engineering challenges were too daunting. (I still cringe when I think about the horrible interference effects caused by Berkeley’s misaligned campus announcement system.)

I’d be more curious for the implication of real life EQing, specifically, all you’d need as one of the listeners is to identify the whole range of sound, and instead of grouping all the bass, all the mid, all the treble, you could stand around with six other people, each phone playing a different range, and still get the full experience without being drowned out by people of the same range standing around you. In turn, if you want more bass, you have two phones with low registers playing near one another. Bulk up the mids? Add a few more phones to beat back the highs and subwoofer tones. Granted, the audio register capable on cell phone speakers is limited, but it should be sensitive enough that it would matter if you limited it to three or four or maybe five frequency ranges.

I’m also curious if instead of breaking it down by frequency range, what would happen if you segmented it by instrument? Could you have 60 people standing together, all with cell phones acting as a Marshall stack? Even more interesting, if you were to run this system with the performer amidst the audience, what kind of effects could you manage from having 12 feedback loops running in every direction around a guitarist with a portable amp and broadcasting rig. You could create a drum resonance chamber by just having people stand around the drum kit while it’s played.

Now I’m just all kinds of curious to see how this scene fits into the whole book.

(And of course: I did not know about any of that Lips stuff. But I am glad to know about it now!)

(sorry, smart post, my brain was just short circuited by the geeky textual pun.)

(I am a founding patron of the Committee to Find and Rescue Annabel Scheme, by the by.)