Schools

Pushing Musical Performance Boundaries

The finale of the 2012 Margaret Guthman Musical Instrument Competition, the "X-Prize for music," will be webcast live from Georgia Tech Friday night.

There’s plenty of live musical acts to catch Friday night. You could venture to Vinyl at Centerstage and hear Plain Jane Automobile, or slide over to the Northside Tavern for a little blues from Stoney Brooks.

Or you could go to Georgia Tech for the finale of the Margaret Guthman Musical Instrument Competition. But even if you couldn't make that event, you could still plop down on your couch and watch and listen to competition artists extend the limits of music performance. 

Georgia Tech will webcast live the finale of the 2012 Margaret Guthman Musical Instrument Competition Friday at www.gtcmt.gatech.edu/guthman2012 from 7 – 8:30 p.m. No log-on is required, and the site will feature live chat and segments from preliminary performances.

Find out what's happening in Midtownwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

The event is a hotbed for musicians and artists who are pushing the boundaries of music performance. Wired.com has called it the “X-Prize for music,” and contestants have likened it to a TED Conference for new musical instrument designers.

Twenty-three inventors, composers and designers from nine countries were selected to compete from more than 50 entries. Here are four examples from this year’s entrant pool:

Find out what's happening in Midtownwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

  • Resistor JelTone, a partially edible toy piano by Brooklyn-based hacker collective NYC Resistor;
  • Audio Cube, a set of smart light-emitting blocks for music creation designed by Bert Schiettecatte of Belgium (with competition performance by Colorado-based electronic musician Mark Mosher);
  • Hyperkeys, a keyboard with keys that move in and out as well as up and down, by Jeff Tripp; and
  • Audio Skin, incorporating on-body textiles in a sculptural and performative musical instrument, by Vienna, Austria-based Martin Rille.

Finals will be held in the Klaus Advanced Computing Building at 266 Ferst Drive. The event is free and open to the public with advance RSVP online at www.gtcmt.gatech.edu/guthmanrsvp. 

“We want the competition to be the place to see, experience and engage the future of music,” said Gil Weinberg, director of the Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology, in a press release. “It’s also a platform for bringing like-minded inventors and composers together from all over the world to have their ideas judged by a preeminent panel of independent experts.”

Instruments will be judged on musicality, design and engineering by an expert panel including Atau Tanaka, media artist and researcher, and Cyril Lance, chief engineer at electronic musical instrument manufacturer Moog Music.

“While paradigm shifts that accompany new technologies create frontiers that redefine the artistic process, musical traditions are useful points of departure that help us to question assumptions, extend practice and push the envelope of what is musically possible with technology,” Tanaka stated in a news release. “There is a disruptive power in questioning traditional musical roles of authorship and performance. Through this questioning, the basic tenets of musical instrumentality come to light.”

In total, $10,000 in cash prizes will be awarded to the most exciting novel musical instruments.  The prizes will be and presented by Tech alumnus Richard Guthman in honor of his musician wife, Margaret.

Past competitions have hosted a broad range of inventions, including last year’s winner, MO, by Interlude Consortium, the software that explores novel gestural interfaces for musical expression with everyday objects; and second prize winner MindBox Media Slot Machine by German group Humatic Berlin, a vintage slot machine with an unexpected modern twist on the age-old tradition of canon composition.

- The Georgia Institute of Technology contributed to this report.


Get more local news delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for free Patch newsletters and alerts.

We’ve removed the ability to reply as we work to make improvements. Learn more here

More from Midtown