What does someone have to invent a new instrument? If you ask the finalists of this year’s Guthman Musical Instrument Contest, you will get different answers – including boredom, curiosity and frustration.

The creative impulse is often triggered by the question: what if a piano could sing? How does a guitar learn to play microtones? Can a keyboard instrument be taught to overturn like a cello? Some of the participants had to expand their skills to include wood carving or soldering. One sought help from his plumber; another from his Lego-obsessed 7-year-old.

In a normal year, finalists can bring their creations to life in front of a live audience. Although the annual competition, organized by the Georgia Institute of Technology, was held online this year, the videos submitted by entrants allowed viewers to immerse themselves in a world of ingenuity. The university announced the winners on Friday.

Guitarist Kaki King, one of the judges, said in an interview that it was nearly impossible to compare and evaluate entries that contained a harp-guitar hybrid and an electronic khipu that was knotted on an ancient Andean encryption method Strings based. King said what ultimately guided them was the tactile attraction and magnetism of an invention.

“As a player, writer and composer,” she said, “you have a desire to put your hand on something, and that determines the measure of its value.”

Here are five highlights of the competition, brand new members of the huge family of instruments.

Ulfur Hansson (Reykjavik, Iceland)

The design for Ulfur Hansson’s electromagnetic harp came to him during a monotonous college course. He logged into a computer graphics program and drew a scribble: a circular line that winds inward and gathers in the center in a heart-like shape.

“It was definitely vision over sound,” Hansson said in a telephone interview. This winding diagram, the result of a mathematical relationship, now adorns the flat wooden surface of a shield-like structure that hides 24 strings that were made to vibrate by electromagnets. The magnets can be activated by buttons engraved in the front panel or by remote access via a computer, causing an ethereal hum like a ghost organ.

Since the strings can vibrate either at their fundamental frequencies or at one of the harmonics of their overtone series, the Segulharpa is “kind of chaotic,” said Hansson, who carved four of the instruments and soldered the electronics by hand. “It just keeps evolving when you play. You can feel that it is shaping itself. “

David Shea, Monica Lim and Mirza Ceyzar (Melbourne, Australia)

Experimental pianists have long played with hand-held electromagnetic devices called e-bows, which vibrate the strings of the piano without direct contact. There are prototype pianos with a built-in electromagnetic component, but their size and cost keep them out of the reach of most performers.

Composer David Shea dreamed of an instrument that would transform any concert grand piano into an electromagnetic piano capable of both traditional sounds and steady drones of electronic music. “I thought, could there be a travel version that is modular and can be constantly adapted by anyone who plays it?” he said in a video interview with Monica Lim, a fellow pianist and composer who helped shape the design.

Their groundbreaking idea was a mini-computer for each note that hovers over the string without touching it. A pianist can play both the electromagnetic component and the traditional keyboard at the same time – “a dialogue,” said Shea, “between the old and the new” – or in a duet with another person (or a computer) using the drones Sing brings. The device is portable and easy to install.

“It’s more like one layer sitting on top of the other, more percussive sound activated from the keyboard,” Lin said.

Atlas Cogulu, Tolgahan Cogulu and Rusen Can Acet (Istanbul)

Tolgahan Cogulu has been teaching the guitar to play new notes for years. “I love the guitar,” he said in a recent video interview. “I can’t play my own music, though.”

Turkish music is based on microtones, while traditional guitar has frets that arrange the pitch according to western vocal systems. In 2008, Cogulu designed a microtonal guitar with movable frets, but it continues to be a specialty instrument.

One day, his young son Atlas made a Lego replica of his father’s microtonal fingerboard. Cogulu immediately saw its potential. “It’s a miracle idea,” he said. “It’s the most popular toy in the world and the most popular instrument. And when you combine them it becomes a microtonal guitar – because you can move the frets on the Lego studs. “

Rusan Can Acet, engineer and PhD student at Istanbul Technical University, had the idea of ​​3D printing a base plate for the fingerboard. The Lego pieces snap into place and a set of movable 3D printed frets are attached on top. Production was almost ridiculously cheap, said Cogulu, and only stopped briefly when they had used up all of the thin, square one-off pieces in Atlas’s Lego collection that are essential to their design.

In class with his students, Cogulu discovered that he had come across a tool for teaching music theory. With its movable frets, the microtonal Lego guitar makes the changing intervals visible in various Western, Turkish and Balinese modes. Cogulu and his team are making the 3D printable files available to everyone for a modest contribution. He also plans to build pre-assembled versions that he hopes will be useful in music schools.

Clark Battle (United States)

“I’m basically an unreasonable cellist with guitar envy,” said Clark Battle. As an improviser, he admired the chordal flexibility of a piano or guitar. But, as he explained in an email exchange, he was unwilling to give up the flexible pitch of his chosen instrument, the cello. He began to wonder what a piano could look like that would allow a musician to vibrate and push notes – as you can on the cello.

The result is the Evolano – a “further developed piano”. The instrument has keys, action and hammers like a piano aligned along a central ruler. The strings move with the keys and slide over a curved fret that sets the pitch. Chords are played the traditional way of a keyboard by pressing multiple keys. By moving the hands, the entire chord structure can move smoothly like a cello glissando.

Battle said his study of kung fu impressed him on the importance of “respecting the natural vertical symmetry of the human body.” Regarding the sound, he added: “To be honest, I had no expectations of the tonal aspects of the instrument. Since there is no precedent for tonality, it would sound like what it did. “

Steve Parker (Austin, Tex.)

Steve Parker’s musical instruments make no sound. Instead, this trombonist uses brass instruments as sculptural hearing aids. His inspirations are the early 20th century military sound location devices – some referred to as war chambers – that were used to detect approaching enemy aircraft before the invention of radar. Parker’s instruments emit a similar threat, with yards of Seussian tubing ending in the exposed bells of trombones and sousaphones.

Parker’s devices – some portable, others attached to a gallery wall – become part of compositions that play with the dimensionality of sound. They also associate music with aggressive listening modes like surveillance and espionage.

“They’re picture frames – but they’re more than that,” said Parker in a video interview from the American Academy in Rome, where he is currently a fellow. “They don’t just choose and amplify certain sounds. They also resonate at certain frequencies. Since the instrument vibrates when the sound hits it, it harmonizes it in a subtle way. “

Parker says the effect on the listener is disoriented. He likes how the repurposed marching band instruments – rich in associations with warfare, protests and modern gladiator sports – can be turned into tools for listening together. And he enjoys the “piece of bricolage” with which instruments are dismantled and their components are soldered with copper pipes from the hardware store. As he did so, he said, “I’ve become quite friendly with my plumber.”

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