A Pox on Melody

I thought this was going to be the easy assignment.
After having a good deal of difficulty avoiding and removing melody and rhythm from my clouds assignment, I assumed that a project where I COULD use melody would be an easier assignment for me. Oh how wrong I was.
I was previously accustomed to thinking of performing music as being either melodic, rhythmic or ideally both. I also came into this class with a conception about how music should be played, how the notes should be chosen. It was a traditional view, focusing on instruments and technique, not a mouse and choice. I enjoyed messing around with the patches for MAX/MSP before this week, but they don't feel like instruments to me.
At least when I was working with clouds the entire project was a new experience. But for this week I was trying to incorporate the new technology and techniques into a structure that I "understood."
Of course, working on this sort of thing probably expands my horizon more than any other type of work I did this semester. I still prefer instrumentation that is more traditional, I enjoy the creativity forced by using a very limited set of producible sounds. But, music that can be made by the techniques I used this week can still be very beautiful and obviously filled with intense labor.