A Musical Experience-- Part 1

I'd been meaning to write this post for a while, but over time the thoughts and ideas have been growing and changingso fast I can hardly keep up with them.
It all began with a chance encounter, the day I stumbled upon this little clip:

I didn't know what it was, or where it came from, but it moved me in such an unbelievable way. The subtle way the song builds from the beginning until it finally explodes in a single moment when the two voices unite. After watching the entire movie shortly after , I realized that this was by far the best part of the film.
A while ago, I received a great piece of advice from one of my instructors: find things that inspired me or got me excited, and try to make a game of them. Try to put them into an experience to share with a player. I thought to myself, "how spectacular would it be to do something like this is a game? to play as a character who brings a song into a crescendo with their own actions?"
From then on, I got hooked. Obsessed with figuring it out how to design a system around this idea---here's the thing; I did a whole lot of head scratching and late night Googling, but as far as I knew, I had yet to discover a game that tried this; that is, put the player in the role of the star of a musical. There'd been a slew of rhythm games in the past, but I wanted to get the player to create their own music.

I went to Reddit to ask for more advice, and the ensuing discussion spawned some fantastic new material for me to work with.

It was suggested that I take a look at a game called Proteus, which came very close to the sort of thing I was looking for. Proteus is a game where the player  navigates a randomly generated landscape, interacting with objects by standing near them. Each object creates its own sound, and so depending on where the player is standing, they can create different kinds of music that flow seamlessly into each other.
I also learned a new term, "aleatoric music" which is music that is left up to a certain player to complete; not entirely random, but still very much changeable and open for interpretation. I wanted to use this term to fuel the idea behind future designs.

Overall, I find it so interesting that music is a relatively unexplored territory in games, considering how influential it can be to a human being's experience. If a single song can bring a person to feel apprehension, sadness, joy, or elation, imagine all the damage it could do working within the right kind of game. I don't think its a question of nobody thinking of it before, but I do think it requires an awful lot of effort and knowledge on the subject to pull off well. However, I'm becoming more and more convinced that music holds a treasure trove of gaming gems to be discovered. On thing is for sure; if I want to go digging there, I first need to start thinking like a musician.
Time to go dust off the piano!