The Guthman Musical Instrument Competition is a cash prize contest for new musical instruments held this month at Georgia Tech, judged by Wired’s Eliot Van Buskirk, Harmonix co-founder Eran Egozy, and Georgia Tech’s Parag Chordia. There are some familiar faces in there, but some fascinating, new ideas, too, like a motorcycle engine you can play with a keyboard. Thanks to everyone who sent this in.
Wired.com has a slide show of images with audio samples and videos for many of the projects:
New Musical Instruments Battle for $10K in Prizes
CDM held a similar contest judged by drum machine pioneer Roger Linn and the members of tech-loving band Freezepop, held at NASA’s Ames Research Center and Yuri’s Night last year. The difference: we offered one Tenori-On; this had $10,000 in cash prizes. Oh, and we sort of had folks show up randomly and judged them partly based on how loud the crowd cheered. But I love the idea, and hope we see more of this kind of spirit of experimentation.
I know we have some Georgia Tech readers here, and I expect a few of the contestents – did anyone get video of the competition itself? Anyone want to send along some additional documentation of your project? Remember, you’re Always a Winner on CDM (SM)!
I quite like this self-contained sampler tool with monome-style controller: