I always enjoyed having my students create ringtones and discuss the musical ideas they came up with and decisions they made. One of the aspects of the process I focused on was how to compose music for such a short amount of time. Robert Voisey wrote about this topic in an interesting article at New Music Box in 2004 asking, “How short can a composition get?” He mentions composers ranging from Chopin to John Zorn.
For those of you who have your music students create original ringtones or have thought about the possibility, cellware is a web application and website that allows one to upload an mp3 file and transform it into a ringtone for free. I haven’t tried it out yet but you might want to.
I think this is a phenomenal lesson idea. What a great way to be able to incorporate phrasing and musical ideas as well as compositional components. Thank you for giving us this great idea!