I looked at House Party, an arduino controlled room that utilizes household objects (lamps, shoes, tvs, etc) to create its own symphony.
I was surprised to see how much this project could get done with a modest amount of basic circuitry. Elements like the shoe tapping (which seemed to control both rotation and "tapping" with the same motor) was impressive to me. They used Logic Pro (the same DAW I have been using for years now) and fed it MIDI data from json files to get the sounds to play. I would like to do something similar with MIDI files, and go as far as assign all 127 values to some kind of response. For my automoton project I ended up doing something musical (Wilson, the drummer puppet) but I would like to go even further combining music with physical computing.