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The X.E.K.I.Photo: Courtesy of Georgia Tech
For the past 26 years, the Guthman Competition at Georgia Tech’s Department of Music has introduced the world to strange and innovative instruments. The contest welcomes inventors from all over the world to build and explore the future of music, and together, they’ve produced some truly weird and exciting sound machines.
“We live in an era where it’s really hard to come up with the next guitar or the next violin, because the tools for creating musical instruments are so accessible to everyone now,” said Jason Freeman, chair of the Department of Music at Georgia Tech. Today, inventing a successful instrument forces you to work across different domains of industrial design, musical performance, and computation. An ability to see into the future helps, too.
The competition developed a serious pedigree over the last few decades. Past winners include instruments that have become well-known staples in the world of music, including Teenage Engineering’s OP-1, the Roli Seaboard, and the Orba. The competition involves all kinds of instruments. Many go on to become commercially viable products, others are niche tools for professionals, and some are standalone art objects unto themselves.
Georgia Tech announced the 10 finalists in the 2024 competition on Wednesday. The list that includes an astonishing range of music machines. One common theme that runs through many of them is accessibility.
“It takes a lot to be able to sit down and play Rachmaninoff. One of our goals is to kind of raise that initial floor, so your first interaction with an instrument is more than just being able to play ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb,’” Freeman said.
As soon as you pick up any of these instruments, you’ll be able to make something you’ll really like. “But they still reward that deep engagement over time, so that your relationship with the instrument grows the more you invest in it,” Freeman said. “To my mind, that’s what makes for an ideal instrument.”
The finalists will meet on the Georgia Tech campus in Atlanta, Georgia on March 8 and 9 to compete for $10,000 in prizes. In the meantime, you can get a preview of the future of music by clicking through the slideshow, or just scroll down if you’re on a mobile device.
The Bone Conductive Instrument, or BCI, is a project that allows people with hearing loss to make and listen music—but that’s an oversimplification. It’s both an instrument and a way to play back previously recorded music. You hold the BCI against you, and it sends sound signals through your body by vibrating against your jaw. That means it responds to your unique physical characteristics, and it means that the BCI lets people with any level of hearing ability to play and listen thanks to its system of haptic feedback.
The Circle Guitar sort of looks like a regular guitar, but it’s controlled by a spinning wheel with 16 individual magnets that strike the strings. It allows for rhythms you could never produce with your hands. You can program and sequence the notes on the fly—including how hard they’re played—and since your second hand isn’t strumming, you can play chords with all of your fingers, mute strings in innovative ways, and otherwise manipulate the guitar using unprecedented techniques.
The Sonògraf isn’t the first instrument to turn images into sounds, but it probably does it better than any you’ve ever seen. You draw pictures on a sheet of paper, and a camera captures that image. A line scrolls across the screen, playing its notes and sounds as it scrapes across the page. You can adjust that playback using a series of physical controls, and thanks to video and audio outputs, it makes for performances that bridge the gap between audio and visual art like never before.
Vocal Chords is a device from composer and programer Max Addae that lets you modulate and augment your voice as you sing. It works with three rubber chords that are measured by stretch sensors. Each of the chords controls a different effect, which you can then manipulate by pulling, stretching, snapping, and massaging the strings to change how the sounds are manipulated.
BodyMouth answers the question: what if your whole body was a mouth? The instrument combines elements of dance, performance, and composition using a series of sensors attached that measure how various parts of the body are moving. That data is then mapped onto values in a vocal synthesizer in real time using custom software. As a result, the instrument isn’t just producing sound, it’s producing speech, “literally turning the body into a mouth,” said Kat Mustatea, the artist behind BodyMouth. The performers’ bodies become the instrument. In other words, as they dance, they’re also singing.
“We studied how the tongue, oral cavity, lips, and larynx all go into speech production and then created a mapping of those variables to the rest of the body,” Mustatea said. “The connectivity between body movement and speech synthesis is a series of equations, essentially, which map between the geometries involved in movement of the body, to the geometries involved in the parts of the mouth that produce speech.”
You can even use BodyMouth to produce real words once you get really good at it; cut to 1:29 in the video above to see it yourself. It makes for a surprisingly musical effect that creates the possibility for brand new genres of artistic expression.
Correction, January 20th, 11:38 a.m.: A previous version of this article erroneously said the BodyMouth uses MIDI. We’ve updated the article with more information from the artist.
The Babel Tabel, an instrument from Canadian musician and contemporary artists Jean-Francois Laporte, uses compressed air to power a series of latex membranes to produce a wide variety of noises, from deep percussive thrums, glitching electronic sounds, and organic, synthesizer-like swells. It snores, barks, screams, chirps, and more, with each of its strange elements handled independently by a series of articulate controls. It looks sort of like an elephant.
The X.E.K.I., short for eXpressive Electronic Keyboard Instrument, combines gestures and the movements of your body with a sort-of-but-not-really traditional keyboard. It creates a number of new sonic possibilities, letting you control things like pitch and timbre by moving the X.E.K.I. in different ways against yourself as you change the notes. Think of it like the weirdest trombone you’ve ever seen.
The Lorentz Violin makes sound using a spinning magnetic disc that rotates at different frequencies in front of a guitar pickup. The player adjusts a slider to control the speed of the disc, changing the notes the instrument is playing, which are then played through a built-in speaker. It produces whirly, organic tones that feel like a mix between what you’d expect from a weird synthesizer and the sounds of an ancient warped record.
Thales looks like a pair of hockey pucks. In between them sit magnets, accelerometers, gyroscopes, and magnetic sensors. This measures movement in three dimensions, and lets you produce sound by playing with magnetic fields. You can push the disks against each other and fight against the polar opposite magnetism, but you can also hold the Thales up to other ferrous objects and translate their magnetism into sound.
The Yuan is a controller that uses touch, brightness, and motion detection to manipulate sound. It’s centered around a bizarre pulley system that harnesses sensors built into the frames of four tambourines, which you play by moving them through the air, turning them toward or away from light sources, or touching them at all. Beyond that, it gets pretty hard to describe the thing with words.
