Can You Pick Which Of These 20 Strange Instruments Will Be The Best In The World?

The Turner Winch is an acoustic instrument that uses a winch to control the tension on a strings, modulating their pitch.

Buildacode is an experimental tool for sound programming, which seeks the integration of object’s manipulation into a visual programming environment for real-time sound creation.

It’s aimed for people that with or without previous programming knowledge, would be able to enjoy tangible sound coding through the manipulation of friendly objects.

Alberto Boem’s SculpTon is a malleable tangible interface for sound sculpting.

The O-Bow is a bow sensor musical instrument, designed to let you incorporate traditional bowing gestures into MIDI performance.

Aural Cavity is a new instrument that generates sound based on audio feedback. The instrument is made of a plunger head, a portable speaker, plastic tube, clip microphone, a DSP patch running on a laptop. Most importantly, it requires an object with a cavity, such as a cup, bottle, or the performer’s mouth.

31 thoughts on “Can You Pick Which Of These 20 Strange Instruments Will Be The Best In The World?

    1. Very interesting idea. Do you guys know if there is something similar to this in M4L for example? Shouldnt be too complex to recreate in software, play with a random buffer of a sample in a step sequencer setting.

  1. Most of the these nominees are only usable or even interesting to a few people. But I’d give the prize to Judy Pizza’s Dulsitar; for craftsmanship, and musicality (potential).

    What the hell kind of 1970’s space command center are those people sitting in?! So cool !

    1. YAYBAHAR! no electricity needed for this firepit camping trip music festival

      yaybahar could EASILY be the hottest new mandatory item to have in a dwelling or have to take on trips and any event really.

  2. I think the definition of ‘musical instrument’ needs to exclude anything that can’t actually make music. 🙂 As to my top choice, despite my love for the electronics I’m going with the Dulsitar. For a controller, though, the O-Bow is pretty darn clever — if you can get the technique down. I think the Dualo Du-Touch has a lot of potential and I quite liked the Cantor Digitalis. 🙂

    1. Who gets to be the ‘music police’ that decides what is or isn’t music?

      A lot of the music I listen to (dark ambient, classical electronic music, Berlin School) probably wouldn’t be recognized as ‘music’ by mainstream listeners!

  3. I’m both thrilled at the creativity on display here, and dismayed at the silly idea of competition between these ideas. Hey musicians, competition is for sports!
    Music is for collaboration.. the ideal would be a jam between all these instruments, showing their strengths in the context of co-creation.
    My utterly subjective impression is that the Yaybahar speaks to me most as a totally original acoustic design, and in the electronic world the o-bow looks really impressive just on that short clip.. it would be even better integrated into a whole instrument.. seems ideal for Artiphon’s Instrument 1 actually.

  4. If I was allowed to vote I would vote for Tine organ or Yaybahar. O-Bow and Dulsitar also look interesting, but in my opinion most on this top 20 actually are rather performance midi controllers controlling computing devices, which generate sound signals via probably already known digital algorithms and not that much musical instruments emitting physical sound waves – that’s all about terminology – what we call a musical instrument (software/hardware), of course

  5. Many interesting ideas here, but the only ones that I thought were a) original and b) produced real music were Nomis, the Dulsitar, and the Tine Organ. The o-bow looked neat, but it seemed more like *part* of an instrument. The multi-person “choir” might have potential. The Turner Winch looked like it had limited potential for musical usefulness – but it looked like one helluva lot of fun, too.

  6. The yaybahar is great! An entirely NEW sonic world is opened WITHOUT the use of electricity.
    Pure genius if you ask me. When shal we know the outcome of the competition?
    THANKS and greetings from Italy

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