A Musical Experience -- Part 2

I've done a great deal of thinking about music in games. I would very much enjoy someday making a game that stars a player in their own musical, meaning:

1. The player influences the music that is played, not the other way around; 
2. the environment responds to the player much in the way it would in a musical, such as other characters joining into song and dance;
3. the player can use music as a way to advance the game's narrative, such as solving puzzles or combating enemies (this is by far the most game-y part of the idea, since most musicals don't really involve this, but there are obvious connections to the way a musical works).

I understand this is a huge undertaking, so before I ever try my hand at such a project, I'm going to spend a lot of time getting better at designing games. One way I can help this idea along, though, is by breaking it down into smaller components to solve the individual design problems. Interestingly enough, the three features I listed are so intricately connected to each other that one can only be attempted after the one before it has been solved.

collaborating with other design-thinkers on reddit, I began formulating a system that stayed as true as possible to my idea--allowing players (most likely with no musical experience) to inform the way music in the game sounds, and how those sounds in turn inform the player's future actions. I've made a terrible flow chart to describe it here:

You can see there's a feedback loop going on. In order to represent this in the purest form, I then designed an interface in order to experiment with ways to make this concept the most fun and game-like:

I depicted a simple image of two people singing to each other, one being the player, the other being the game; but this could be played with to see how two players might work together. The bars on the side measure success, meaning depending on how well the player can manipulate the music, the higher the bar rises, and when they are both full, the game is won. I put in two bars so the player focuses on getting them both up; seeing as how there are no antagonists or enemies here, this forces the player to try some different combinations in order to succeed. The bottom bar allows the player to see their input in response to the game. This part probably requires the most work, because the way it looks now resembles a rhythm game too much--but the bar can be easily changed and played around with. For now, there's a single background song playing, and the player creates the melody.

This is the design problem I'm going to be focusing on for the next year or so. With this setup, I can already picture lots of iterations to play with--I'm excited to try it out!

I obviously don't mind whether or not somebody starts using these ideas and working with them on their own, otherwise I wouldn't write about it. There are lots of creative ways to go about this, I think, and it is such a challenging problem that anyone who could pull these features off in a game successfully deserves some props.