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Generally we see musical all-stars as artists who already receive hordes of attention, who are lavished on the stage as gods of pop culture (or, in the case of Bono, a god of mankind).

But this is unfair to those who don't receive recognition. If I'm creating a hypothetical Champaign-Urbana super group, I'm not including our most recognized artists like REO Speedwagon or Ludacris, nor am I batting an eye at Headlights or The Living Blue or any band currently being mentioned approximately 28 times per issue of buzz.

Rather, I'm including those artists whose musical efforts seep into our subconsciousness without us noticing. Consider this:

You can't always avoid what you hear. In the womb, you're transmitted Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" to supposedly make you smarter (even if you were more of a Mozart kind of fetus), and even if you're not religious, someone will inevitably sing a church hymn at your funeral.

We are captive to what our poor eardrums are subject to. As I write this, a couple of completely drunk kids a few rooms down are attempting - and failing - to play the didgeridoo to the song "Killer Queen." Though the originality is appreciated, it sounds like they're having a glorified farting contest, judged by Queen guitarist Brian May.

Champaign-Urbana has musicians with the tenacity to do something with as much novelty as the didgeridoo/Queen experiment, but something that actually succeeds gracefully. They're not "scene," per se. They're mostly under the radar of the media. But they do occasionally sneak their art into your subconsciousness, and for the remainder of this article, they'll be assembled together as the all-star band of Champaign-Urbana. We'll call them "the Chambandas."

Susanne Wood, chimes.

Aside from REO Speedwagon and Ludacris, there's someone else from Champaign who has played to hundreds of thousands of people.

For the past 36 years, Sue Wood has provided the background music for students racing to make their 1 p.m. classes. From the Altgeld tower chimes, Sue plays "Illinois Loyalty" flawlessly, as she's done time and time again. If there's time left, she'll play something else, maybe "Hail to the Chief" or "Wipe Out" (if she's in the right mood).

"We usually play things twice," she says. "Once for people to determine what it is, the second to enjoy it."

Sue has a soft spot for the traditional church hymns, but she takes requests, too. Her repertoire includes the Star Wars theme, The Beatles' "When I'm Sixty Four," Minnie Ripperton's "Lovin' You (Is Easy Cause You're Beautiful)" and the classic drunken anthem "Tequila," which she says is "kind of meaningless on the chimes."

One thing you've never heard being emitted from the Altgeld tower is an F. As in the F note. That's because the tower doesn't have an F chime, and it's not an oversight. It's not there because it's not in "Illinois Loyalty." Nevertheless, if you were to request one of the fine songs written in F major (most notably Meat Loaf's "Bat Out of Hell" and - no joke - "Tequila"), Sue would find a way to make it work.

She's a feisty character when it comes to her chimes. As she stepped up to the levers to ring the bells above her, I thought, "This can't be that hard." Then she went off, pushing the levers down feverishly yet accurately, and moving to and fro from one side to the other with the energy of a little kid. Playing the theme of "Masterpiece Theater," it appears that she's just flailing her arms and hitting random levers, but the sound coming from the chimes above is flawless. She seems completely and intensely focused on the rhythm, like one of those people who can effortlessly dance a perfect score in "Dance Dance Revolution."

Sue says she'll play the chimes until "she can't go up the stairs any longer," and judging from the way she's still moving around, don't be surprised to find Sue up there in 20 years, banging the chimes to "Bat Out of Hell."

Mark Smart, guitar and continuum fingerboard.

If you're making one of your usual midnight ghost-hunting runs and you happen to have snuck into the third floor of Everitt Laboratory, do not be alarmed if you start hearing loud, shredding guitar riffs akin to Eddie Van Halen on "Eruption." This isn't a ghost. It's just Mark Smart.

What's Mark doing up in Everitt so late other than spooking out the janitors? He's playing around with his continuum fingerboard, an instrument he's currently helping to perfect that was invented by his U of I colleague Lippold Haken. The concept behind the instrument is borderline mind-blowing.

The continuum fingerboard is a touch-sensitive instrument that resembles a keyboard in terms of the placement of notes on its surface, but differs from it by allowing the musician continuous pitch control, to the point of sliding in between half-step pitches if so desired. The instrument's computer can detect where the musician's fingers are and how much pressure is being applied in three dimensions (emphasis added because I assume that's the mind-blowing part).

"It's sort of like the keyboard," Mark says. "But most keyboardists, if they're expert piano players, whenever they sit down and try to play it, they complain. 'What is this? What am I supposed to do with this?'"

In addition to being a 27-year veteran on guitar, Mark has been playing the continuum for about three years, constantly coming up to record in Everitt on one of the 80 continuum fingerboards in existence. He believes that by developing techniques on the continuum, he's making contributions to the evolution of music. He thinks in the future, the continuum could have a serious impact on how we play music.

"The saxophone took 100 years to catch on," Mark says. "It took hundreds of years for the piano to become accepted over the harpsichord. So hopefully, it won't take as long for this."

Michael Powers, drums.

Michael Powers is sitting in his living room, and he has a Fisher Price toy telephone up on his ear, the fake mouthpiece tucked right up against his gray, foot-long beard.

"Operator, gimme long-distance," he starts singing. "Long-distance, gimme heaven. Heaven, gimme Jesus. Uh, sure, I'll hold," he says, with a look of honest bewilderment on his face, as if Heaven's operator has actually put him on hold. After five seconds of silence, his eyes light up. "I think it's for you!"

Michael does the same kind of routine at Urbana's Farmer's Market every Saturday from 9 a.m. to noon in the summer and fall. Except add some drums, a tambourine, a harmonica, an occasional bugle horn ("his newest passion"), a maraca and an audience for him to play off of.

"Truthfully I don't do any songs," he says, then reconsiders. "Well I do, actually. I've made a point to actually do songs. But you could call it more improvisation. My approach is more like responding, encountering in a positive way. I'm never actually sure what I will do."

He occasionally likes to fall back on a couple of Farmer's Market-themed songs, like "Watermelon Man" and the Donovan hit "Colours." But honestly, it's not about the song, it's about the attitude. All Michael wants to talk about is music and joy.

"I have faith in Jesus and I have joy because of that faith," he says. "There are times I feel like if I focus on sharing my joy, that's close to like sharing the Gospel.

"The thing about this market is I'll see people I went to high school with," he says. "I'll find out a friend of mine has died. I'll see people that I used to drink with. I'll see people I know from church."

Chris Rishel, vocalist.

So we've got a wonderful backing band, and now we need a front man. Someone who will stand out in the scene and who could be the face of the band. It was a no-brainer where to look: U of I's bustling barbershop quartet scene.

Chris Rishel sings baritone for the barbershop act Tesseract (also the name of an English ambient-metal act), which has to be the most intricately named barbershop act ever to exist.

"You gotta realize that I am a big nerd," Chris says when explaining how he came up with the name. "Basically, a tesseract is a hypercube in four dimensions, and, like, each one of the dimensions represents one of the voices in the quartet . it's a good thing to talk about on stage to kill time."

Chris reveals that barbershop is going through a revolutionary period in which newer, young quartets try to experiment and expand upon what older, traditional quartets do. That includes pranking those old fogies.

"At the international competition last year - I thought this was hilarious - there was a quartet called the 'Pen15 club,'" he says "No old guys got it, because they don't understand that if you write 'Pen15' it looks like 'penis.'"

But there's musical expansion too. Chris has the ambition to apply his mathematical skills to composing and arranging music for barbershop that transcends the typical classics.

"If you put a lot of time and a lot of thought into it, it can have a similar beauty to deriving a particularly elegant mathematical equation," he says. "Like when you take this pile of math and it turns out to be E=mc2 or something like that." And so, purely hypothetically, what do the Chambandas play? The possibilities are limitless, and the members fit the stereotypically required roles of a band wonderfully. Chris is the brains of the operation, the musically disciplined songwriter who could take something like "I'm Henry the Eighth, I am," and make it a sonically epic nine-minute masterpiece. Mark is his complimentary technical counterpart, able to take Chris' complex arrangements and produce them efficiently on the fingerboard (in addition to at least seven shreddings per show). Sue is the heart, able to lighten up the pieces with the delicate precision of the chimes. And Michael is the old-school rock and roller who pumps life and energy into every movement he makes with genuine entertainment value.

Whatever they choose to play would be pure gold. It could be the next mega-trend of pop culture. And it would almost certainly be the most daring thing Champaign-Urbana has heard since the didgeridoo was set to "Killer Queen."