musical improvisation for novices

Here's the idea- make a little looping music toy, that lets you improvise melodies. I've thought a lot about this kind of thing, and I was talking to Adam Kumpf about it, since he's thinking about making a new instrument, probably guitar-like, that has some kind of feedback built in to help structure the space of notes, so it's easier to play in a particular key or scale. So this brought me back to thinking about my noteblocks project (a set of wooden blocks with buttons, that each trigger short melodic fragments) and electroloops (documented on my old home page, a two-player looping instrument controlled by squeezing to generate notes in a major scale).

I think playing with looping could be a good way for people to learn how to improvise, because it simultaneously gives you real-time feedback (you're controlling notes right now), can show you a short-term musical structure (if it's looping over a bar, it could give you a visualization of the whole bar), and could also both let you see and manipulate larger musical structures (a higher-level interface that lets you swap between different improvised phrases, or between "layers" or instruments).

One of the key problems I think with existing toys that make it easy to improvise is that they don't help you see the structure of the melodic space. Beginning jazz improvisers are taught the blues scale, but they don't know the different meanings of the notes (e.g. the flat five versus the one), or that these meanings can change relative to other notes in a phrase, beats within a bar, and bars within a form. So this looping toy should have some explicit visual structuring, not telling you which notes to play, or simply limiting which notes you can play, but illustrating their different meanings (and possibly, their different meanings at different times).

So... all that is just to say, it would be fun to mock something up like this using the scratch board and something like my sequencer scratch project to control notes in a loop. It could probably be done in a couple hours.