The popularity of IPhone applications is proving to be a major revenue stream with which big brands are capitalising.  For example, BSkyB have recently announced that they will soon begin to sell FA Premier league highlights in the form of a new IPhone app.  This will surely be a hugely popular product however all this talk of monetising, revenue and premium content generation is frankly soul destroying.  All we want from our technology is for it to be damn cool – and what’s cooler than music?  (We’ll have that debate another time)

Plucky developers have been turning their talents to building various instruments that can be played on the IPhone.  This has inevitably led to the forming of IPhone bands:

This is all well and good, but I believe that we should think bigger.  Would it be possible to gather together enough musical Iphone applications that we’d be able to form an IPhone orchestra?  For this we’re not going to emulate an old school Classical Orchestra or even an Early Romantic Orchestra – we’re bringing things right up to date with a Modern Orchestra which of course, looks like this:

So now we have to find some instruments for each of the sections.  Let’s take care of the woodwind family first.

No one has been posh enough to develop a bassoon or clarinet app yet, but we have found our flute:

Next we need to fill up the brass section.  I’d love to see a tuba app, but for now we’ll have to make do with this rather lovely trumpet:

So we have enough to get a nice little melody going but how can we add a bit more rhythm?  For the percussion section the IPhone Drummer will take care of the snare drum, bass drum, timpani, gong, cymbals and triangle!  I’ve never seen an orchestra with a turntable or slide whistle, though…shame!

Our orchestra is starting to come together now.  Let’s add a little piano:

And finally – the string section.  There’s a nice selection of applications out there including this rather clever violin app…

…and even a realistic sounding harp!

And with our ‘orchestra’ complete, all that is left is for some clever musical type to compose a piece for it!  You never know – we may still have something up our sleeve yet.