The finalists for Georgia Tech’s annual Guthman Musical Instrument Competition just dropped.
Music nerds and lovers of fascinating inventions, rejoice! The 10 finalists in Georgia Tech’s annual Guthman Musical Instrument Competition were announced recently, and they’re just as weird and wonderful as we’ve come to expect. The competition offers a $10,000 prize for “the newest and greatest ideas in music.” In 2017, the Guardian called it “the Pulitzer of the new instrument world,” and it’s proven to be a pretty reliable source of talent over the 28 years that it’s been operating, with several past winners having gone on to found successful music companies like Roli and Teenage Engineering.
This year’s winner will be announced in mid-March, and in the meantime, the competition’s website has short videos of all 10 finalists’ entries.
One of the most pleasing aspects of this year’s competition is the diversity of the finalists’ creations. Some are genuinely new and innovative instruments that either fill an existing niche or carve an entirely new one. Take, for instance, the “Gajveena” (above), which, as inventor Debjit Mahalanobis explains, “is a combination of two of the lowest-pitched instruments in the world.” (The instruments in question are the double bass and the rudra veena.) The resultant instrument looks kinda like a double bass that has been retrofitted with the fretboard from a sitar, and Mahalanobis uses it with both bow and fingers to create a striking variety of low-end sounds.
