How does a stone sound?

[el`Ol]

Hello all!

Some years ago I read an interview of the founder of Celemony (maybe some of you know their product Melodyne). He said he was able to separate the sound of an instrument from its binding to time by asking: how does a stone sound?
My thoughts about this cryptical remark:
Assume there i an axis thróugh the stone. The axis is standing 90° to a plane. The stone is moving through the plane along the axis. The distance of the surface of the stone cutting the plane to the axis is representing the waveform at a certain time (movement along the axis) and phase (rotation). But this would still be bound to time.
Then assume: the axis of the stone is random-floating (two degrees of freedom) while the plane cutting the stone is standing still. There would be no longer a fixed time axis and the sound would be aperiodical while there is no movement along the axis (similar Melodyne`s capability to retain life in the sound while pointing to a fixed point of time).
The original sound would be a spiral in three-dimensional space that would have to be interpolated to get the whole surface of the stone.
I find it a shame that looping samples is still the gold-standard in electronic instruments. I would have never thought ten years ago that would be the case in 2007.
Does anybody else have ideas for the next generation of keyboards?

Regards, Oliver

[lohk]

Can you eleborate more clearly what you mean (for me at least)?
Todays standard is not looping for handling samples in time, it usually is some kind of granular synthesis - a mixture of aynchronous and synchronous granular synthesis mostly, realized either in time-domaign purely (old-style) or using fft-windows. A lot of programs nowadays incorporate that to "free" time and melody form the inevitable boundaries.

But what do you mean by the sound of a stone? I - as an electroacoustic composer - work with concepts of creating and elaborating sounds from even very unusual sources. I also have worked with stones. Like any other "thing", sones can sound "if propery hit".

[el`Ol]

The difference of my stone concept (interpolated spiral in three-dimensional space where time, phase and amplitude of the original sound define the spiral) and granular synthesis is that there are no cuts and window functions.
By the way: Is granular synthesis really the standard today? I thought it is more an exotic concept.