Pandora's Music Box

I've long pondered the pros and cons of producers making their own programs and designing their own equipment to make their music. Constant progression to make exceedingly complex movements expressible by simpler more subtle human movements.
These days with loop banks and now midi loop banks (a performance of a section of music by an artist, sometimes very prominent professionals, which records the loopable section and then allows you to choose what instrument you want it to be played) anyone, a trained or practiced musician, or even someone with no musical experience at all can use these tools. Most commonly software on PCs sometimes in standalone hardware for specific applications (applications=genres; like the MPC to HipHop, and your casio SK-5 to electronic music).

Anyway, most producers not necessarily just for hiphop/rap will tell you all about things like track automation, your software instruments, those digital software plugin inserts that act as a whole warehouse full of amps and old speaker cases and patch bays to reproduce any classic [analog] sound your ears desire and the control to make completely new original sounds and effects. In the modern music industry you might take a digital template around with you that you work from- essentially a list of the exact position of every fader and pan knob, all recorded automation data still in the right place from a similar project, and connections of every piece of equipment you added into that software. Allowing you to pack up a whole mixing board with out bumping a single switch and all the elaborate connections to the external equipment and instruments into the size of a quarter (flash drive), or a single CD. And essentially take your entire studio engineered for making a specific sound or instrument to any computer.

Basically I've been thinking for a long time about the decreasing minimal human effort to make the same music, or new music. It seems almost inevitable someone will make a 'music box' eventually. Something which 'makes' music on it's own or with some sort of randomizing input to spin the variables in the collection of samples, instruments, necessary information about automation (pan, vol), harmony and rythm, along with googles of pattern variations of every type of music ever played and changing programs to splice, randomize and organize them and play the result (or start playing) almost instantly.

I think everyone who makes music using a computer these days makes one of these, or at least a part of what an automated system would be like to help automate the repeating factors or whatever sort of music they are making. Weather it's conscious or unconscious, by the nature of saving your work to a computer you are essentially saving a template. As i've been making music ive designed and saved more and more tools and templates that help me make my style of music and eventually started toying with making my own very simple music box. One day if I ever manage to make a working version of and automated music machine from the recipe of my work or hiphop you best believe it wont be going anywhere. I would never sell it and I would never make another, I might actually destroy it if it ever was successful.
But if there ever should be one of these machines made...

I hope it can only play country



[edit]
Here's an old link I remembered: http://edition.cnn.com/2006/TECH/10/03/musical.robot/index.html
Pretty interesting. There's a video too.