Music nerds and lovers of fascinating inventions, rejoice! The 10 finalists in Georgia Tech\u2019s annual Guthman Musical Instrument Competition were announced recently, and they\u2019re just as weird and wonderful as we\u2019ve come to expect. The competition offers a $10,000 prize for \u201cthe newest and greatest ideas in music.\u201d In 2017, the Guardian called it<\/a> \u201cthe Pulitzer of the new instrument world,\u201d and it\u2019s proven to be a pretty reliable source of talent over the 28 years that it\u2019s been operating, with several past winners having gone on to found successful<\/a> music<\/a> companies<\/a> like Roli and Teenage Engineering.<\/p>\n This year\u2019s winner will be announced in mid-March, and in the meantime, the competition\u2019s website<\/a> has short videos of all 10 finalists\u2019 entries.<\/p>\n One of the most pleasing aspects of this year\u2019s competition is the diversity of the finalists\u2019 creations. Some are genuinely new and innovative instruments that either fill an existing niche or carve an entirely new one. Take, for instance, the \u201cGajveena<\/a>\u201d (above), which, as inventor Debjit Mahalanobis explains, \u201cis a combination of two of the lowest-pitched instruments in the world.\u201d (The instruments in question are the double bass and the rudra veena<\/a>.) The resultant instrument looks kinda like a double bass that has been retrofitted with the fretboard from a sitar, and Mahalanobis uses it with both bow and fingers to create a striking variety of low-end sounds.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not the only string instrument on show, either, although the \u201cEV\u201d\u2014a sort of hybrid acoustic\/electronic viola\u2014takes a very different approach to the task of producing something new. As per designer Brian Lindgren\u2019s website<\/a>, the instrument arose from a \u201cdesire to create an electronic musical instrument for string players that retained the sense of embodiment and detailed nuance of sound generation that string players are accustomed to.\u201d Several other entries also combine the acoustic and electric: the \u201cPost-Digital Sax<\/a>\u201d takes the acoustic sound created by the player\u2019s breath and manipulates it digitally in real time, while the \u201cKal\u00edptera<\/a>\u201d creates beautiful ambient drones from two resonance boxes and a gyroscope.<\/p>\n Other entries are more outlandish and\/or conceptual. There\u2019s something called the \u201cDemon Box<\/a>\u201d (above), which picks up and amplifies the frequencies of the electronic devices that surround us and form part of our everyday lives\u2014and in doing so, reveals how many quotidian devices turn out to have very distinctive electromagnetic signatures. (If you\u2019ve never heard a man play an impact driver, have you even really lived at all?) A project called \u201cThe Amphibian Modules<\/a>\u201d is a modular synthesizer where the patching is done by submerging electrodes in a saline solution, while \u201cFiddle Henge<\/a>\u201d mounts four violins on a motorized bass drum, with suitably cacophonous results.<\/p>\n![\"Demon](\"https:\/\/gizmodo.com\/app\/uploads\/2026\/02\/Demon-Box.jpg\")