The hot new musical appliance: Your smart phone

Often in the middle of the night, while his wife sleeps next to him, John Sheridan picks up his iPhone from the nightstand and shakes the appliance 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.

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