Ten thousand dollars is up for grabs through the Margaret Guthman competition. Georgia Tech is the host for the yearly musical instrument competition that promotes new musical instruments. The prize for the winner is $5,000. The deadline for entry has been extended to November 1st. The winners all rate highly for their ability to perform, program technology and compose great sounding music. Can you come up with a brilliant enough idea to win this competition? And then build it?
ShapechangingInstruments.com is always looking for new sources of inspiration. Here are some of the lesser known areas of acoustics that can help inspire.
Bioacoustics
Wikipedia defines it as the investigation of sound production, dispersion and reception in animals. (including Humans) Animals serve as good inspiration for thinking about new ways to generate sound, and also process sounds. Snapping shrimp work with the relationship between sound, pressure and heat to create a unique and awesome effect.
One year from now, ShapeChangingInstruments will be filled with awesome unique creations. But for this year, the number of lasercut instruments is low, but the hope is, that some outside the box thinking will be good for both of us. What’s great about the current list of makers, is how many people are posting their projects onto instructables and thingaverse.
Keith McMillen is the founded Keith Millen Instruments about 7 years ago and it now has about 15 members. Keith made his name in the music invention and instrument making industry with his innovative and interesting creations. His music instrument inventions give the artist of today inspiration and a more advance and dynamic way of self expression. New technology inspires him and his team to explore new dimensions to showcase the wonders of music.
Keith has been into music technology for about 30 years already. He started at 1979 with Zeta Music. His desire to showcase a more interactive and modern music instrument has lead to his numerous design innovations. His creativity has paved way to creating a new market for music instrument design. Through the years he has founded G-WIZ which is a research and development laboratory for Gibson Guitars. Several years after that, he founded Octiv Inc. which focuses on the problems regarding inconsistent audio quality. He later on sold Octiv Inc. and went on to fund BEAM Foundation’s operations. One of his precious music inventions may be the MAPPS. This is described as “an integrated computer composition, notation and performance system”.
Our team is building research notes on successful kickstarter projects. Here are our background notes on the ten most funded kickstarter musical instruments. You should be able to guess the most popular idea. But, where does your idea fall into the top 10? Considering how small many of these groups are, the industrial design, quality and price points of many of these instruments is incredible.
EDIT: The folks at Gtar pointed out that we somehow missed the Queneo during the first draft of this article. This list is now the top 11. In order to make amends, our next piece is on Keith McMillen.
EDIT 2: WE REVISED THIS LIST FOR 2015
Honorary Mention goes to the Turbinophone falling just outside the top ten list with $8,300 in April 2013.
Drum roll please….
Shape Changing Instruments 