I like to take long walks in the countryside and on many occasions I find myself working out grooves and riffs after a kilometre or so (I’m mostly into straight and fast-ish techno so my pace matches the tempo quite nicely). This often yields astoundingly driving kernels of beats/hooklines and it’s certainly good exercise. Be careful no-one is watching you unless you want them to think you suffer from a mild case of mania
Here’s the idea: What if there was a gadget like a little dictaphone [it]cum[/it] sample replacer. It’s a little box with a high quality microphone and an internal sample-set of say 5 Gigs or so (or you could load up your own custom ones etc) . You would beat-box or drum your ideas into it using your mouth or a pen or a coke can etc etc, the gadget would analyze the sounds (maybe you could create some fingerprint sounds in the initial set up phase to make it learn your own personal sound lingo, but that’s optional.) and convert them to drums and synths et cetera.
A typical recording session would probably go like:
Take One, dum, dum, tish,dum...
Take Two: nowpnowpdooowowp...
etc etc.
To make things less complicated the gadget wouldn’t bother with midi-like timing but take what you feed it at face value (remember it’s chiefly a sketchpad if you’re really into music you should have at least a basic feel of rhythm , lazy folks! Hehe.)
Implementations are endless…you colud use it as a superfast sequencer, you could set it’s tolerance to very high and get unexpected glitch effects out of it. You could even take a walk and record traffic noises to see what it spits out.
Everything you record with it would be stored as a midi file for further editing.
Watta tink?
Marco
...but it poses a quite a lot of questions. What if they developed a tablet you write on. You select a mode, likely named for famous artists and styles. Then all you did was draw something close and it would turn out a flawless drawing based on you mode...would the be any artists at all if everyone was an artist? Would there be any musicians if everyone was a musician? Would it create elitism to the highest form? Or would there be none? 
