ocarina of beauty

^ A quintet performs Led Zeppelin's Stairway To Heaven on their iPhones.

I shelled out the .99 cents last night for the Ocarina app for the iPhone. It's really charming! You can practically teach yourself to play a tune. I learned how to play 'Mary had a little lamb'. Then it has a feature that pictures a 3D earth you can turn with the flick of a finger, with tiny points of light, each representing another person playing their 'flute'. Whenever someone plays it you can actually hear their tune in real time, the echoing quality of the flute lending it a rather haunting atmosphere, and a very pretty, tubular beam of blue light with little green circles emanate from where they are, whether it be New York, France, England, Australia, Japan, or wherever.

Last night I heard someone from the U.S. playing some tune from J.S. Bach, but can't remember which. The most common tunes played at the moment are 'Amazing Grace' and 'Taps' (probably because it's Veterans Day here in the U.S.). Of course, when I play my tune my blue beam of light and green circles emanate from southern California, too. Must learn to play other tunes.

There's something beautiful about the synthesis of man made cutting edge technology and using it to watch and listen to tiny points of light from around the earth set against a vast blackness, each point of light representing a fellow human being, each waiting their turn for your eyes and ears while you wait your turn for theirs.

A strange and poetic kind of connectedness.