You could get skilled with the piano after years of practice, but imagine how good you’d be at playing an instrument you invented.

A college course and the iPhone are making that possible for computer-science students at the University of Michigan.

Now, at the end of the course, the class ensemble of 11 students are preparing to put on a live concert — one where every musician’s instrument is an iPhone.

Taught by Georg Essl, an assistant professor of computer science and music, the course (titled “Building a Mobile Phone Ensemble“) trains students to code their own musical instruments for the iPhone, using the Apple-provided software-development kit.

“What’s interesting is we blend the whole process,” Essl said in a phone interview with Wired.com. “We start from nothing. We teach the programming of iPhones for multimedia stuff, and then we teach students to build their own instruments.”

“We don’t stop there,” he continued. “We don’t just see this as an engineering exercise. We want to do the whole process where we start from nothing, and then we go to performance next week in a live concert, where people can come and listen to the outcome of what students have learned in the course.”

The advantage of digital music can be seen in instruments as far back as the electric guitar: the flexibility to manipulate bits of code to create different sounds, superseding the limitations of a traditional analog instrument. Naturally, technological advancement keeps raising electronic sound to new heights. In recent years, musicians have been experimenting with gadgets ranging from laptops to high-tech cellos, and from cellphones to bent circuits.

Essl said he’s been playing music with mobile phones since 2005, but the iPhone is unique because it starts out as a highly sophisticated blank slate with multiple sensors: a full touchscreen, a microphone, GPS, compass, wireless sensor and accelerometer.

Using the iPhone SDK and some supplemental audio tools provided by Essl, students in the course learn to program the device to play different sounds, based on the information it receives from one of its multitude of sensors. Tapping the display, shaking the phone or blowing air into the mic, for example, can all translate into different sounds.

Students in the class are experimenting with the iPhone in a wild variety of ways, Essl said. One student’s instrument uses the iPhone’s video-savvy screen and microphone to synesthetically work the relationship between color and sound. Another student is exploring what the iPhone can do with feedback and distortion.

“I think it’s an interesting spread,” Essl said. “People come to it not with a literal sense of, ‘I know piano. I want to build a mobile phone piano.’ They have a concept.”

The Michigan Mobile Phone Ensemble will perform Dec. 9 at 8 p.m. in the university’s Britton Recital Hall. See a video of the ensemble in a practice session above, and a video overview of the class below.

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