aefb.org - FÜR FRANZ

We think that the mobile telephone represents an unpublished situation, in a certain sense also an extreme one, in the contemporary soundscape.

We (Francesco e Luca) don’t love it, and it is maybe the only "popular" technology with we are not able to familiarize.
However, its widespread use as well as the easy acceptance of this unpublished use of signals and sounds that the mobile introduced, present a lot of reflection materials.

The mobile represents powerful intrusion of the private into the public, the signal of the ringtone is more addressed to the recognition of the person than of the object itself.
If every object has its own sound, it is clear that a phone cannot have the sound of the singing of a little bird (for example): if this happens, that means that the sound identifies the object, but this is not its communicative principal objective. The sound characterizes the owner of the telephone toward the outside and, at the same time, it can give references to the owner himself, according to a personal code, regarding who is calling.

It is a kind of portable soundmark of the personal acoustic-musical experience , toward the owner himself as well as toward an outside audience. The coherence of the sound refers to an acoustic-experiential space and it is thrown, without any intermediation, on an acoustic space completely indifferent to it.

If a community refers to the possibility to share the listening of a common soundmark, sharing the same ringtone can represent the possibility to create a portable, mobile soundmark for virtual communities.

"Für Franz" consists in the distribution of a little melody and this melody refers to a particular sphere of experience: as the name of the piece suggests, it is dedicated to a particular person, Franz, who is one of the authors of the project.

Distributing this little melody as a ringtone to the participants at FKL symposion (to the ones who want to use it, of course) means:
- to denote , through a portable soundmark, our virtual community;
- to invade the private coherence of the melody itself with its use in a very public context. The private sound became a public sound

We propose to use as a "portable soundmark" this ringtone , which is a significant melody in our private sphere, as a tool to reflect about the various roles of the ringtone in our inner and outer soundscapes.