The world's first symphony orchestra assembled from online auditions makes its debut tonight at New York's Carnegie Hall at 7.30pm local time (12.30am GMT).

The Youtube symphony, created by the web site, was assembled from among the 3,000 people (among them the Guardian's Ed Pilkington, a violinist) who downloaded sheet music by Academy Award winning Chinese composer Tan Dun, shot an audition video and uploaded it to the website. The roughly 80 players were chosen on the strength of their online audition clips by judges from the London Symphony Orchestra and other organisations, and San Francisco Symphony music director Michael Tilson Thomas, who conducts the ensemble tonight.

To promote the concert, which also features world-renowned violinist Gil Shaham, Youtube today posted a "mash-up" of the grainy audition videos which, when knit together, seem to approximate an orchestral performance of Dun's Internet Symphony No 1, "Eroica". The work is on the programme tonight along with selections from Bach, Villa-Lobos, Mozart, Brahms, John Cage, and other composers.

Youtube has billed the ensemble as the "world's first collaborative orchestra", perhaps setting aside the fact that an orchestra is by definition a group of classical musicians playing together. The company touted the ensemble as a mixture of established professional musicians and emerging amateurs.

"It could be described as something between a summit conference, scout jamboree or musical get-together," Thomas told National Public Radio. "It'll be the first time that people from so many different countries will have had a chance to discover one another online and then actually meet up and make music together."