Context 

1. We were really inspired by the 21 Swings project. We really enjoyed how people could come together with a familiar physical object (toy) and use it to express themselves musically. We especially liked the collaboration aspect of it. However, the more we thought about what we could do that was similar to the 21 Swings, we realized that we had to choose between collaboration, and expression, and we chose expression. We felt that a musically expressive playground would be fun to create and play with so we took that idea from the 21 Swings.

2. From that, we looked at other auditory playgrounds. We found this one which loops the sounds associated to these orbs that you can connect with lines. We liked the idea of looping the sounds because it allows someone to have the feeling of accomplishment after playing in the playground when the hear their end product, and this is a feature that the 21 Swings lacked.

3. We also played around with the idea like this and this. These two games are completely auditory games with no real objective other than to change/create the musical score and sounds. You do this by moving and interacting through the environment. While we didn't end up doing something exactly like this, we were inspired by how the environment played a part in the game and we thought we could do something similar to this using a 3D space (both virtual and physical) with the Leap Motion Device (as opposed to the Kinect because it's nice and small and simple to use).

4. The reading that resonated the most with us is Dixon's Performing Interactivity because towards the end of the reading, Dixon mentions that play could be named an essential element to media performance and artwork. We saw this in action when, for the previous project, our group members created a game (the Madlib constructor) for the audience to play as part of our performance. In the second to last page, Dixon states "Interactive works encourage a playful, childlike fascination for the pleasure of cause and effect, where a simple hand movement [...] causes a domino effect [...]". We realized that almost every other source we looked to for motivation had this 'childlike fascination' that Dixon mentions and this led to our last source of inspiration.

5. During class when we were discussing ideas, Xavi remembered this game called tonematrix. It's just a 16x16 grid of squares. There's an invisible line that sweeps across the grid from left to right and as the line touches a lit up square, it plays the associated tone, as if the program was reading sheet music. It was really fun to play with because we could visualize shapes and hear what they sounded like if we created them on the grid. This is where we got our primary inspiration from as it incorporated all of the elements we wanted to include. We realized using the Leap Motion that we could add another interactive element that could be fun as long as it was easy enough to use. Then we'd just recreate the scene in Unity and use the act of throwing a cube as out point and click.