doing something entirely new for you is a big source of inspiration to continue, yes.
parallel to the other rb's post: i am halfway through a sound residency now and have used it to explore the curious world of prepared piano. well, electro-acoustic prepared piano. it does and doe not resemble a regular piano--it looks like one, it is one, but the materials that you put into the wires and the electronics that we pump through the soundboard significantly alter the sounds it produces. it splits pitches into lots of microtones, generates gamelan sounds, bell sounds, wood sounds, rubber sounds, damped sounds, bendy pitches where no bendy pitches should be. it is also an exploration of materials used in the wires, on the wires--and of the interactions of materials with electromagnetic fields.
i had practiced all summer a series of techniques that i cannot use. what is happening is entirely different from what i expected, which is the adventure.
last night i spent a few hours going through stuff, including the main piece i listened to over the summer to get my head around the idea of using sound to generate an environment rather than to make a piece of music in any straight sense. it was david tudor's rainforest 4:
http://www.emf.org/tudor/Works/rainforest.html
and was suprised at the extent to which thing shave been moving conceptually in a straight line, and at how much of tudor has leaked into this project. rainforest happens in a large space and involves a considerable number of metal sculpture suspended in various sectors, the audio signals from which are mixed live with a simple mixing board and some effects (delay)...the inversion we are doing works entirely inside a piano soundboard, but is mic-ed in such a way as to make the soundboard the equivalent of the huge space the rainforest requires.
i write this from the land of preoccupation.
i am sure that there is a level of the insufferable in it.
but it is a land that exists for a finite period only, and being there is pretty interesting.
moral of the story:
change your sound from time to time and use the change as an excuse to rethink the instrument.