As Reported By The New York Times - With New Music Software, Cellphones May Start To Mix It Up A Little By Noah Shachtman (Tao Group)

The cellphone already serves as a camera, a calendar and a portable > arcade. But it could take on a new set of uses if a group of audio engineers, software designers and marketers has its way.

These music technologists are pushing new programs that are turning the cellphone into a palm-size answer to the turntable, or a slimmed-down recording studio on the go. In time, the group hopes, the software could recast the phone as a replacement for the electric guitar.

The music-mixing software now on millions of PC's may soon become a fixture on cellphones and hand-held organizers. These early programs are crude, able to blend only a few sound snippets at a time. But by allowing amateur D.J.'s to create mixes with their cellphones, the software could offer musicians a new level of autonomy, and give nonmusicians another reason to stare at the little screens in their hands.

"It's putting D.J. tools in the hands of everybody, with a technology that everyone already carries," said Drew Hemment, a member of the FutureDJ collective, a group of British electronic musicians. In August, aboard a cruise ship off Helsinki, Finland, Mr. Hemment remixed a short set of house and electroclash beats in a live performance for a party of about 1,000. A Motorola MPx200 cellphone, loaded with a program called miniMIXA, was the only equipment Mr. Hemment took onstage.

Considered the most sophisticated of the mobile music tools, SSEYO miniMIXA, released by the Tao Group, puts on a phone five channels that users can load with a few bars of a bass line, a keyboard lick or a drum beat. These sounds - digital samples of performances or phrases > in the MIDI (musical instrument digital interface) format - can then be jumbled, rearranged or otherwise tweaked by using a small bank of filters and effects, like chorus or delay.

> The results can be mixed live, as Mr. Hemment did on the ship, saved as a ring tone or sent as an e-mail message.

As is the case with most music software, mastering the more advanced components of miniMIXA can take hours, even days. But the basics can be learned in minutes.

"I'm not a musician, and that's one of the advantages of this product," said Dave Eagle, a computer science researcher at the University of Teesside in Britain who has used miniMIXA and other SSEYO products. "You don't have to have creative skills to create something. It's just good fun."

The software is online at tao-group.com. The company, which is based in Reading, England, is expected to announce an agreement shortly that will put the program, preloaded, on some phones and organizers.

Jason Gordon, a mobile product manager at Microsoft, described programs like miniMIXA as part of a logical progression. "First, the mobile operators offered a couple of preloaded ring tones," he said. "Then users could also download their favorite songs instead. This is the next step."

So far, most of the mobile music activity has been overseas. MTV > International and Motorola have put together a program to blend > elements of two songs into a ring tone mash-up. In England, EMI Music and the mobile carrier Orange recently signed a deal so that the carrier's users could remix tracks from Kelis, Gorillaz and other artists using Orange's Fireplayer software.

But allowing songs to be broken down into their musical building blocks, then rejiggered by fans, isn't a step all labels, or all artists, are willing to take. Phil Murphy, a former executive at Sony Music Europe and Warner Music Asia Pacific and now an independent music and technology consultant, believes they are fighting a coming tide.

"We're moving from a static world, where record companies give you prepackaged music, to a much broader suite of offerings: weird mixes, jammings, even access to the core tracks of a recording," he said.

Right now, seasoned musicians accustomed to desktop music programs like Cubase and ACID may find software like miniMIXA maddeningly limited. There is not enough memory on the hand-held devices to store more than a few minutes of high-quality audio. But the software is quickly progressing, said Tim Cole, the Tao Group's head of audio. Eventually, Mr. Cole said, miniMIXA will be sophisticated enough to allow artists to jam over the phone.

"At first, this will be a way for kids to make their own personal ring tones - ones that no one else has," Mr. Cole said. "But as the software grows up, musicians will turn the mobile phone into an instrument that can really sing for them, like Hendrix did for the guitar."