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Watch 300 Android devices make music together

Google Japan today released a new video showing 300 Android devices “singing” in unison. Each of the 300 smartphones and tablets feature a different Androidify character playing the same song via the device’s speakers.

It is called “Android Chorus” and it goes a little something like this:

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What you’re hearing is a rather odd rendition of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, the final movement of his Symphony No. 9. At least, that’s the introduction. The Android Chorus song quickly breaks out into a different beat, one that we found quite mesmerizing to listen to.

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The chorus will be performing from February 12 to February 15 at Omotesando Hills in Tokyo. We presume the event will be filmed, so we’ll likely have more footage by the end of the week.

Whether this is an “ad” in the strict sense of the word doesn’t really matter, as the initiative clearly plays into the company’s recent “Be Together. Not the Same” campaign, which debuted along with Android 5.0 Lollipop in October 2014. The campaign was also pushed at CES 2015, not just by Google but by its hardware partners as well.

Most recently, Google turned to cute animals as a new way for spreading its message. While that was definitely a genius marketing move, today’s video is technical genius at work.

“A lot of people play music on their phones,” Yuko Akiyama, Google’s head of device marketing, said in a statement. “But what about using those phones to make music?”

Apparently all it takes is some 300 droids and a few willing humans.

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