There has something new happened for the music lovers. They'll be now able to hear some more good music produced by 25 new innovative musical instruments that competed against each other at the first annual Guthman Musical Instrument Competition.
The 'Silent Drum' invented by Jaime Oliver won the first prize. Drum, different from popular music instrument guitar, has a flexible drum head which forms black shapes in front of a white background when pressed by fingers. The shapes are recorded by a video camera and sent to a laptop where Max/MSP software turns the shapes into sound in real time.
The Second prize was won by 'GuitarBot' devised by Eric Singer. The instrument not only performs electric guitar parts for Lemur (League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots), but can also perform complex solo compositions.
The third prize went to David Wessel, a Berkeley University professor and an electronic music veteran, who performed on the 'Slabs'. Slabs is an interface for the Max/MSP audio program having touchpads sensitive to fingertip pressures. And if your girlfriend is also a Slabs lover, this can be a superb Valentine's Day Gifts for Her.
There were many other innovative musical instruments. One of them made drum and bass sounds by running fabric through lasers. Yet another mounted a keyboard on a motorcycle engine while another contestant made an instrument inspired by solving a Sodoku puzzle using wooden blocks.
The contest for discovering the best ideas for innovative musical instruments was organized by Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology and Harmonix, the company that gave the popular video games 'Guitar Hero' and 'Rock Band'. More than 60 musicians, inventors and hobbyists applied for the competition according to the wholesale review. 25 applicants were given an opportunity to show off musical instruments devised by them. The prizes included $5,000 for first place; $3,000 for second place; and $2,000 for third place. Apart from the three top prizes, a copy of Rock Band video game was awarded to the winners of fourth, fifth and sixth places.
The competing musical instruments were evaluated by an expert panel of judges based on musicality, design and engineering. The Judges included Eran Egozy, who is the co-founder of Harmonix Music Systems; Parag Chordia, who is Georgia Tech Professor; and Digital music expert Eliot Van Buskirk, who is an author, columnist and blogger writing for technology magazine Wired that has presented a photo gallery of musical instruments, with description about how each instrument works as well as samples of the music each of them produces.
More at Review Blog.
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