Now in its fourth year, the Margaret Guthman Musical Instrument Competition has featured some incredibly original and innovative musical instrument designs. Hosted by The Georgia Tech School of Music and the Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology, the competition awarded this year’s winners a total of $10,000 in cash prizes. The final performances and results were webcast live on Feb. 17th, but for those who missed it, all the videos are available at the Georgia Tech website.

Marco Donnarumma won first place with Xth Sense, a wearable biophysical system which captures, amplifies and manipulates sounds produced by muscles in the human body. The organic, yet glitchy sounds produced by this are controlled by movement of the body, resulting in very physical performance.

Cracked Ray Tube, a system that “disrupts the interfaces of analog televisions and computer monitors to create self-generated electronic noise and video,” developed by Kyle Evans and James Connolly, took second place.

Third place went to LIGHTUNE.G, a project developed by Bojan Gagic and Miodrag Gladovic that converts light into tone images and sound frequencies. The composition techniques and performance styles that result from this are called luminoacoustics.

There were too many fascinating entries to list here, but the twenty-three inventors, composers and designers chosen to compete included Tim Thompson (which we know better as Artful Codger) with his Space Palette and Bert Schiettecatte with the AudioCubes (performance by Mark Mosher).

The competition is getting better and better every year and the designs really challenge the general perception about what a musical instrument actually is. I can’t wait to see the entries for next year.