An Intuitive Electronic Music Interface

I have been a lover of music my whole life. I have often wished that I had been more disciplined as a kid and had learned to play an instrument well. But I didn’t, and now I still lack that discipline and being older it is that much harder to train my hands to do what I want them to do. This has been frustrating.

So I have tried to think of shortcuts to quality musical expression that require not require developing physical virtuosity. I want to make music, I want it to be good, and I want it to be easy.

My most frequent ideas revolve around electronic music, mostly because electronic music tools generally allow one to record and layer sounds and tracks piece by piece in a way that does not require the same performance skills. They are forgiving tools in the sense that you can try and retry different options until something sounds good, and not be limited by my ability to perform a complete piece, which would be beyond my skill. Much like a word processor makes it easier to write more easily when compared with pen and paper, these electronic music tools allow the same kind of revision and editing.

The downside is that music making can become a technical, dead and tedious process of working in front of a computer. For example, I have tried using FL Studio and find the software powerful, but challenging to enjoy as a process of music making. So perhaps I am looking for something half way between Guitar Hero and FL Studio. :)

Here is my idea of what I would like. If I was independently wealthy and didn’t have anything else to do, I would make it myself. Perhaps by putting here I can find some people to help me, or maybe someone will steal the idea and make it for me.

Essential elements:

• A multi-touch enabled big screen to control the performance
• All of the music generators, samplers, etc. to create sounds
• All of the processing effects
• The ability to visually and musically interconnect the generators and effects dynamically with a drag and drop interface
• Dynamic control “pads” on screen for manipulating the characteristics and parameters of the sound generators and effects live
• Widgets for graphical effects, and visualizations of different types associated with the music, so that the control screen itself can be part of the performance and projected to an audience

Perhaps all we really need is the interface screen to interconnect to existing software systems. But if this could be created I think it could take electronic music creation to both greater heights in the hands of professionals and down to the masses like me.