http://www.newscientist.com/blog/technology

«Customised ringtones are often a bit rubbish and annoying, except for the A-Team and Hawaii Five-O theme tunes, which are damn classy.

Now, infamous conceptual artist Jonathon Keats has created one that treads the fine line between the sublime and the ridiculous. It’s based on 4’33» – a piece of music written by the avant-garde composer John Cage that consists of exactly 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence (for the piano). Another interesting composition by Cage is his Suite for Toy Piano.

Keats’ other projects are well worth investigating. In 2003, for instance, he sought to copyright his own brain, claiming that it’s unique pattern of neural networks were a sculpture that he’d created through the act of thinking. In 2004, Keats set out to «genetically engineer» God in a petri dish, with the help of geneticists from the University of California, Berkeley. More recently, he has worked on extraterrestrial expressionist art, and tried has hand at selling multidimensional real estate.

I find Mr Keats’ new ringtone something of a contradiction. On the one hand it must be the least practical and most absurd ringtone of all time. On the other hand, at least no-one actually has to listen to it, so it can’t be all that bad».