Need help for a school project -- picking your brain. :)

[sirkibble2]

The project in and of itself is not hard but I am having a hard time thinking up some ideas so I would like to pick the brains of this community.

The project is to design a musical instrument out of very random objects. With the one musical instrument created, it needs to have some sort of simple animation to go with it and sounds. It would need to have a mouse-over animation, a mouse-leave animation, mouse-click animation and a mouse-up animation.

I'm not asking to think of everything, I'm just asking for random instrument suggestions.

I am looking for something simple enough to build in 3DS Max (cause I suck at 2D animation) but nothing way too difficult as I'm still a relative beginner. Thanks for assistance.

I am trying to take a game design approach to it so perhaps that will help myself and you also.