Three years after my first attempt in a Schrebergarten in Cologne, during the exhibition "Privatgrün", to teach blackbirds a melody, I suggested the same idea to the "Beethoven Stiftung" in Bonn. Instead of a small sound installation with a whistled melody I proposed to use the mobile phone and a digitalised blackbird to transmit the melody: "Ode to Joy", the main theme of the Fourth Movement of Ludwig van Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.

We launched a huge campaign and offered the people from Bonn a free ringtone. Hundreds of big posters were hung all over the city, 50.000 flyers explaining the project were included in the biggest Bonn newspaper, advertisements in and on busses and the website: www.diesetoene.de were strategic weapons to encourage the mobile phone users to load the new free ringtone and play with the blackbirds. The ringtone was offered using the latest technologies, like MMS, infrared, bluetooth, and downloadable files from Internet. The project was launched by a team of promoters in a stand set up in the city center of Bonn. The work was well noted by the users, newspapers, radio and television.
At the stand, a quartet arrangement for four blackbirds could be heard that counter-sang verses from "Ode to Joy". The four singing voices were distributed to individual loudspeaker channels in order to make the polyphonic composition experiencable as a spatial construction, as well.