The hot new musical instrument: Your smartphone - CNN.com

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(CNN) -- Often in the middle of the night, while his wife sleeps beside him, John Sheridan picks up his iPhone from the nightstand and shakes the device like it was a conductor's wand on fire.

Sometimes he goes on like this for more than an hour at a time. There's a point to this midnight madness, though.

By day, Sheridan is a 53-year-old real-estate agent in Florida. But by night, he's an iPhone musician.

In the past few months, he has used his phone to record and upload at least 30 songs to the Web using an iPhone application called ZOOZbeat, which helps anyone -- regardless of musical talent or lack thereof -- create songs by selecting instruments from a list and then waving his or her phone around.

"You don't have to know anything. You go in there and click on it, and it's playing guitar chords," Sheridan said. "It's pretty neat, actually."

A quick flick of the wrist produces a high note. A gentler movement belches out a lower tone. The app loops the sounds and lets users edit their tracks on the fly or afterwards.

Sheridan said he wears headphones while he's jamming, so as not to wake his wife.

His recording sessions are part of a pocket-sized revolution in the music world: Smartphone apps and programs for handheld gaming consoles now let all kinds of people create and remix tunes on-the-go.

The mobile-music movement is particularly pronounced in the Apple's iPhone app store, where more than a dozen downloadable applications, many of which are free or cost less than $3, let would-be musicians turn their smartphones into keyboards, drums, guitars and all kinds of futuristic synthesizers.

One bizarre application, called Ocarina , even lets people create flute sounds by blowing into their phone's built-in microphone ...

Original URL

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/10/15/iphone.music.zoozbeat/index.html

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/10/15/iphone.music.zoozbeat/index.html