(this entry was originaly a reply to a post, but as it elaborated on the sphere idea I decided to blog it up good)
Heh. I’d like to buy it now too as well…who knows what the future will hold.
Yes, transposing easily is very important. I doubt most people can hum a bassline. So making it easy to ‘go low’ or high needs to be in there. Not just as some option, but as some realtime interactive pitch bend type control.
Singing synthesizers to exist, but they are usually massive double digit gigabyte samples libraries. So that might be beyond the scope of whistler…I dunno though. Maybe Alex in Leopard can sing too :).
Orchestration would be great. On the mock apple webpage, I very briefly ‘aspired’ to the idea of the ‘planet sequencer’ or the ’soundscape’ Or some other catchy conceptual name. Very basically a revolving sphere (that looks extremely cool with lots of visual feedback) which is built up of layers. As it revolves your beats and melodies are etched onto the surface. Looping. Perhaps decaying over time. The equator is a longer loop than the poles.
Coming up with the sphere idea, was for a videogame I thought of on a bus to London a year or so ago. It was a mild epiphany which I scribbled into my notebook.
It has another important aspect to it. Which is the concept of ‘layers’. Each layer is a sound. think core-mantle-crust. So predefined spheres/soundscapes could contain different instruments or orchestrations. You could build up a solar system of music. With spheres orbiting other spheres and the different songs blending between each other.
I’ve given this sphere concept a lot of thought and it excites me a lot. Especially when I start getting wild ideas about how it can subtley interact and progress tempo, mood & effect the composition over time (’shifting of tectonic plates’, ‘weather’, ‘gravity’). The possibiliies are completely MENTAL.
