Moving forward, I started to explore this idea of music created by droplets of water, the juxtaposition of falling droplets and sound, and the metaphorical similarity of ripples created by the impact of a water surface and the wave properties of audio. I decided I wanted to pair music generation with real physical drops of water to create a more immersive and novel experience, instead of just particle effects and pixels I wanted the UI to manipulate the real world in this more meaningful way. I scoured the interwebs for the most unconventional instruments I could find, seeking inspiration for the UI of my project. At this point, I steered away from using weather data—it felt extraneous and ill-fit for what I had in mind, which was a much more user-controlled “instrument” that would create melodies from user input in a locked “foolproof” musical key. I wanted to give users just enough agency over the instrument without requiring them to possess any musical skill to craft something that sounded nice. Essentially, I wanted to give them an almost magical experience, like casting a spell, which in this case conjured a flowing melody accompanied by the actual falling water drops. Finally I settled on creating a UI based on the handpan, a modified version of the steel drum, specifically one I saw in a YouTube video which had a galaxy spiral pattern. I used the same layout and spiral pattern, but in a minimal, more abstract form, using colors to differentiate each note. For the longest time I was treating these notes as buttons, but eventually decided to treat them more as nodes. The final iteration of the UI would use these nodes as points in a never ending loop—the basis for a pseudo-random melody.