Submissions will be accepted until December 4, 2009 and can be made through our online subsmission system.

Here is a link to last year’s submissions.

A note from the Director of Music, Professor Frank Clark

Guidelines

Instruments

Any new musical instrument is eligible for the competition.

Instruments may generate sound acoustically or electronically, they may exist in physical or virtual manifestations, and they may be played by humans, robots, or computers. They may modify, improve, or extend existing instruments — including the human voice —

or they may offer entirely new design paradigms.

New instruments which cross over these categories or which defy any such categorization are also welcome.

Demonstration

Prior to the performance (described below) contestants will be asked to briefly describe and demonstrate their instrument and its key qualities (1-2 minutes).

Performance

Entrants must perform a musical work with their new instrument to demonstrate its musicality, design, and engineering features. Performances may include traditional acoustic and/or electronic instruments alongside the new instrument. They may also include multimedia elements such as video, animation, graphics, text, kinesthetics, hydraulics, dance, or acting. The performed work may be composed by anyone, including the entrant, or it may be an arrangement of an existing work. It may be in any musical style. The duration should be 2-4 minutes. Entrants must be prepared to perform with their instrument at Georgia Tech on February 26th-27th, 2010. In most cases, performances will be public and open to all Guthman competition attendees.

Following the performance there may be a brief question and answer session with the judges.

Judging Criteria

A panel of three judges will evaluate each instrument with respect to its musicality, design, and engineering. Judges will give each category equal weight in their decisions. They may consider a variety of factors in making their decisions, such as range of musical expression, playing technique, usability, and physical construction.

Innovation is a central theme of the competition. Judges will look for instruments that are novel or extend previous work in meaningful ways.

It is important to note that judges will use the performance to better evaluate the musical instrument. In the end, the competition is not primarily about the virtuosity of the performer. However, the more that the performance demonstrates and highlights the unique features of the instrument the more persuasive it is likely to be.

Dates

Submissions due: December 4, 2009

Admission notification: December 14, 2009

Questions?

Contact Leslie Bennett

leslie.bennett AT music.gatech.edu

Shimon, the second robotic member of Georgia Tech’s Robotic Musicianship Group, is designed to play the marimba. It utilizes melodic and harmonic perception and improvisation algorithms, adding to the rhythmic improvisation approach taken by Haile, Georgia Tech’s first robotic drummer. Shimon is designed create rich acoustic sound and to provide communicative social cues to its human counterparts. The robot’s head (currently implemented in software animation) provides fellow musicians visual cues that represent social-musical elements, from beat detection and tonality, to attention and spatial interaction.

See review of Shimon on Wired - Robot Pass Musical Turing Test

Conference proceedings:

Weinberg, G., Blosser B., Mallikarjuna, T., Ramen. 2009 “The Creation of a Multi-Human, Multi-Robot Interactive Jam Session,” In Proceedings of International Conference on New Instruments for Music Expression (NIME 09), Pittsburgh, PA, pp. 70-73. (pdf)

Weinberg, G., Blosser, B. 2009. A leader-follower turn-taking model incorporating beat detection in musical human-robot interaction. In Proceedings of the 4th ACM/IEEE international Conference on Human Robot interaction (La Jolla, California, USA, March 09 - 13, 2009). HRI ‘09. ACM, New York, NY, 227-228. (pdf)

Weinberg, G., Raman, A., and Mallikarjuna, T. 2009. Interactive jamming with Shimon: a social robotic musician. In Proceedings of the 4th ACM/IEEE international Conference on Human Robot interaction (La Jolla, California, USA, March 09 - 13, 2009). HRI ‘09. ACM, New York, NY, 233-234. (pdf)

Video:

Curated by Gil Weinberg

VIDEO

PERFORMANCES

PID Gestures (Jordu)

Guy Hoffman

The first human-robot interpretation of Duke Jordan’s classic jazz standard Jordu, for human piano and robot marimba.The robot Shimon’s playing is driven by its physical structure, through actively improvised variations on practiced gestures, listening and quietly watching the human play, and attempting to fill its part in the ensemble.

Shiraag

Trishul Mallikarjuna

Shimon - the marimba-playing robot

listens, looks, learns, improvises…

follows upon the falls and the rises…

and sometimes, surprises…

Music 3

Ryan Nikolaidis, Sriram Viswanathan, Xiang Cao

Rubik’s Cube captivated its audience for years and in a rebirth is capturing the minds of a new generation. The three by three arrangement of individual parts lends itself to seemingly endless possible permutations. Similar permutations have existed in music since the sixteenth century as imitative counterpoint. Our reinvention of the cube builds on this similarity to extend the original experience of Rubik’s Cube.

However, it wasn’t these permutations that originally made the Cube fun. The enjoyment came from the challenge of trying to organize a jumbled confusion of colors. Now paralleled in music, each color is associated with a distinct style and set of instruments. As the colors on each side are uncoordinated so is the music. Upon solution of the cube, six coherent phrases of music are revealed on each of the six sides of the cube.

In order to move the Rubik’s Cube experience from personal to one that can be shared by an audience we have transfered the tangible cube to a projection of a virtual cube. The performer interacts with the virtual cube with two wireless controllers. Now the user is both solver, performer, and composer.

Tessellation

Akito Van Troyer, Oliver Jan

This piece takes a geometric approach to analyze violin sound, generate visual representation, and synthesize audio signal. Information such as pitch, volume, and timbre from violin sound is used to construct Voronoi diagram which is then used to generate image. Information that is generated by Voronoi diagram is further passed down to synthesize sound that accompanies the violin player.

Mouthful of Music

Brian Blosser, Giberto Gaxiola

The relationship between hierarchical levels of language and music is explored in this piece that combines live reading, singing, and electronic synthesis.  In an improvisatory manner, two performers read passages about words, language, and deconstruction. These readings are recorded and stored as source material.  Just as phonemes are combined in speech to yield words and phrases, so the phonemes samples are combined in granular synthesis to create higher level musical textures and timbres.  The performers also are able to control expressive aspects of the synthesized music, such as volume, pitch, and speed, through the way they speak and sing, mapping vocal expressive control to musical expressive control.  In addition, the piece explores zooming in and out of speech and music by changing time scales, and the how large units can be deconstructed into small building blocks and then recombined to create something entirely different.

Dead Reckoning

B.D. Vamsi, Andrew Willingham, Jessica Sherwood

Dead Reckoning incorporates the use of computer vision and live electronics to create a unique sonic and visual experience. The traditional performer-audience relationship is challenged by the performer’s ability to affect the live electronics by changing the direction she is facing. The freedom of the performer to affect the sonic output of the electronic part is a unique experience for both the performer and the audience. Dead Reckoning is a piece for flute and live electronics in four movements; North, South, East and West.

Audio Stack

Andrew Beck, Meghashyam Adoni, Merica Mae

Audio Stack is an unique interface to explore a non-linear composition.  Separate portions of the piece are stored and played back on physical objects. As the blocks are plugged into the base station, each plays it’s own part of the song.  Participants can spatilize the sound by moving the blocks around, and manipulate the sound by pressing on the sides of the cube.   Each block’s position on the grid, both vertically and horizontally, will affect the sound produced.

Rock n Dhol

Meghashyam Adoni, Jagadeeswaran Jayaprakash, Oliver Jan

All things and phenomena in life are interconnected. One cannot exist without the other. By nature, intrinsically, we are all inherently different. Through our interactions, though, each of us can bring out a unique quality in the other, not through force but inspiration. By aspiring to a common higher purpose, the highest potential and individuality of each phenomena can be actualized. The purpose of this project is to replicate through a microcosmic example, the grand drama that is staged throughout the universe every moment.

This project uses the sounds of the Orient and the Occident, the Mridangam and the Electric Guitar. Each instrument plays by its own rules. Stylistically, one does not dictate the other. But each instrument brings out an unconventional sonic output from the other. This timbral change cannot be achieved without the other. In this unique way, the two instruments uncover a different plane of sound.

A computer listens to what both musicians play, and responds with a cross-synthesized and convolved sound. The musicians are in turn inspired by what the system produces in real time, and the result is an enriching musical experience, incorporating novel ideas for performance, interaction, and improvisation.

INSTALLATIONS

Puzzle Table

Puzzles can delight, entertain and frustrate us in a process of discovery and problem solving. They make us think logically and often require persistence in finding a solution. Tabletop jigsaw puzzles engage our physical senses and provide a social form of entertainment on and around the table. Similarly, we often tell stories around the table, examining media and sharing memory fragments with friends and family through improvised and interactive dialogue. Puzzle Tables combine these two concepts, bringing jigsaw puzzles together with digital media stories on a tabletop display. Puzzle Tables are intended as both artwork and everyday object; they are artistic and geometrical explorations of puzzle, form and function, which also enable multi-user engagement with digital story content. The Dog Puzzle Table integrates a collection of identical animal-shaped puzzle pieces directly into the tabletop of a dog-inspired table. By assembling the physical puzzle pieces in the recessed area of the tabletop, users solve the puzzle and create a flat surface that can serve as an ordinary tabletop. At the same time, they construct a digital story which is experienced through the characters, objects and scenes that are projected onto the surface of the tiles from a digital projector overhead. As the puzzle is  disassembled, the story is deconstructed, and so too are the table surface and its practical usage in everyday life. This deconstruction once again leaves the tabletop playing field open for new story creations to emerge.

Sound Pool

Computing has progressively moved into new physical and social contexts, continuously confronting us with new interpretations of an existing environment. Sensing technologies and programming interfaces can affect our perception and re-conceptualization of our relationship with the built environment, thus allowing us to think about architecture, design, music and computing in a more integrated manner. This perception can be understood as an accumulation of data bits and a fragmentation of our space. Its reorganization, according to Vilem Flusser, provides the image of a “desert”, a world understood as a sand of data that could be reorganized as such. Sound-Pool has been conceived with the aim of understanding how a physical space can be expanded by it’s own digital reinterpretation that emerges through interaction with it’s occupants. It is a spatial construct that influences the way we interact with each other and act within an existing environment. The patterns of movement, the rhythms of occupation of the building and computerized processes are algorithmically incorporated and are in a non-linear relationship. The performance of materials and internal relationships such as physical connections within and between physical systems contribute to an environment that understands space and architecture as new media that can be engaged with digital processing. Sound Pool propagates an awareness and sensibility of our environment through sensing technologies and challenges us to find new dynamic relationships of often-invisible unstable systems that flow through each other and in that way might inform the way we interact with our seemingly familiar environment.

Georgia Tech’s annual showcase of music and art projects exploring the creative space of human-machine interaction.

Nular represents sound objects as balls in an attempt to control granular synthesis parameters through user interaction. These virtual objects move and collide with each other to determine the behavior of playing sounds.

Nular was developed by Akito Van Troyer and Jason Freeman in the Distributed Music Group.

Launch Nular now.