Project Idea: Piano Minigames

One reason I decided to start a blog was to catalog my ideas for projects, businesses, and hobbies. Often when I find a new obsession (my current one is my new MIDI keyboard) I come up with tangential ideas or tools that I wish already existed or have other complementary thoughts. It was my hope that actually writing them down and creating some kind of conversation about them would help me to actually follow through with some of them (the conversation aspect is making the assumption that someone reads this blog... which is a questionable one). So without further rambling here's the project that I would love to undertake if I had infinite time:

I'd like to have a way of quickly creating different minigames that used my MIDI keyboard to help practice different concepts as I learn to play piano. The minigame I'd love to have right now would be something like Paul Nelson's epic 'Math Arena' game except with cords on the keyboard. Play something like that for a few hours and you'd be able to move quickly and confidently between the different chords no problem. But as I continue in my practicing I'm constantly facing new obstacles and coming up with new 'ideal' mingames to overcome them - what I really want is a sandbox type environment that would make it easy to create new minigames as I go.

Thinking about it, I feel like this would be a perfect project for Python. I know it has a PyGame module specifically made to create games with, and I'm sure it has a module for interfacing with a MIDI device all ready to go.

MAN this would be such a cool project... maybe I'll just take a week off after my trip and lock myself into my room and do it. What do ya'll think? Is 2k9 the year of the piano minigame?

P.S. I know what you're thinking: "But James, you already made a post about the dream to-do list project, what about that!" Don't worry, I'm still working on it. I've actually made a good deal of progress on it, I now have the site working with a database so I can edit the list from the site itself. I took a break from it to try and create the website at my job (qcllab.princeton.edu), which is an ongoing project. I'll try to keep you guys abreast of that as well.