Guthman Competition Winners 2025

Nick Rothwell:  Hello, welcome to the Sound On Sound People & Music Industry podcast channel with me, Nick Rothwell. This episode is all about the 2025 Gothman musical instrument competition and I'll be talking to Jeff Albert, Associate Professor and Interim Chair of the School of Music at Georgia Institute of Technology and with Paul McCabe, Senior Vice President of Research and Innovation at Roland's Future Design Lab. Okay, so I'm joined by Jeff Albert of Georgia Tech and Paul McCabe of Roland. So thanks for joining us. So you're in strange time zones. So we have got Paul, you are in LA is that right, okay? Paul McCabe: That's right. Very near LA. Nick Rothwell:  So good morning to you and Jeff. You are in Atlanta? Jeff Albert: Atlanta. So it's just after lunchtime here. Nick Rothwell:  Okay, well thanks for joining us and we're here to talk about the Guthman prize and just kind of see where the conversation takes us. 'cause there's all sorts of different interesting directions I think this might go in, but let's see. Maybe we should kick off with some quick kind of intros, biogs. So to help you, Jeff, do you wanna kind of give some background to yourself as an artist, as an academic, and maybe give us some input about Georgia Tech because, you know, we may not know a great deal about the institution. Jeff Albert: Sure, my name's Jeff Albert, I'm the interim chair of the School of Music at Georgia Tech, I'm in my second year at Georgia Tech, I lived in New Orleans for many years before that. My native musical habitat is as a trombone player and I sort of came up playing jazz and as my taste got weirder, I realised I could make more weird jazz records that few people would buy if I didn't have to pay people to work on them. So I sort of, my intro to the tech world was from making my own records and then I realised I could make more weird music if I got my computer to help me, which sort of got me into computer music making, which eventually led to an academic career, which got me into Georgia Tech. At Georgia Tech, we have music technology degrees. They're not traditional performance degrees like many conservatories and music schools are. Our graduates tend to work more in the tech sector than the music industry sector and so this, the Guthman competition is really fascinating way to sort of show the overlap of what we do. Georgia Tech's well known for creating scientists and engineers but in the school of Music we also engage with the, you know, personal expression and music and creativity. And so the Guthman competition's a really good way of looking at that, of having people who are making new instruments, using like with the goal of that personal expression, but using the scientific and technological tools. So that's why we host the competition and sort of how it fits into what we do. Nick Rothwell:  Okay, I was gonna pick up on that because, you know, it's an institute of technology and yet you've got a school of music so how does that fit culturally? Is that, is that a good fit, is it a productive one, is it serendipitous? Jeff Albert: It's, we're always working at it. No, it's a good fit. It's kind of nice to have some space to yourself on campus, it's fun to be the place where the creative crazy people hang out. I shouldn't say crazy people, that's a bit of it. We're not all crazy, only some of us, but it's also great to be a creative person in a space with access to so much technological knowledge. It's like really great if, you know, if one of us, you know, comes up on something in our research that we're like, oh I'm not really sure how to solve this problem, there are experts around us who know those answers, so just being with that many people, with that much access to deep knowledge and in machine learning and electrical engineering and like all of these other spaces that sort of come into what we do, you know, being colleagues with those sort of world level experts is really great. Nick Rothwell:  Okay, I guess we could go off in a whole other direction here and talk about artists who make their art versus artists who also make their own tools for their art and I guess you're well placed here to have tools and tool makers on hand to help the creative types. Jeff Albert: Sure, both in the same place and my sort of, my personal approach is I only wanna make the tool if someone hasn't already made it. You know, I like, I build systems for myself to make music with, but I'm just as happy if someone else has built a system that already does it. I'm very happy to make music with their system. Nick Rothwell:  Okay, we're gonna come onto that, I've got in my list notes here, talking about people making instruments from the cells versus things that might become products, but we can kind of loop back to that and get onto it in due course. Okay, so Paul, you are with, it says here, Roland Future Design Lab. Can you give us a bit of introduction to your background and what the Design Lab does? Paul McCabe: Sure, thank-you. Yeah Roland Future Design Lab is my current role with Roland, I lead this group. I'll give a brief description of it and then I'll just give a little bit of my background as well. But where in Roland, our product research and development is usually focused on a one to five year window with a really intense focus on the one to three year window and designing and building and delivering products and applications and solutions for that time range, but from a company who's kind of marketing slogan is We Design The Future, needless to say there's a charge to look out and pass that and that is very difficult when there's such an intense focus on this, we'll say the three year window and so a role in Future Design Lab was established last year to be that group that's out on the frontier and we don't build finished things, that's not our charge, our responsibility is to starting with research, we try and understand the world around us and forecast trends and observe trends if there's things that we think are interesting for Roland, usually opportunity but I have to say that, you know, perhaps it might be something that could present risk that we should be more aware of, then we engage with research and we've got lots of different modes of research that we can apply to understand and then to propose and then validate our thinking. If we lean into something where there's opportunity then our next typical course would be to build a proof of concept of some sort, but maybe different from some approaches. Our idea is build proofs of concept that we actually put out in the public and get feedback from the public, particularly when it comes to disruptive tech, like artificial intelligence. We're really committed to not making assumptions on what artists are going to find helpful or intimidating or threatening and so particularly where, when we're in this world of frontier tech, we wanna make sure as early on as possible we're getting feedback from those that might be the target people to use that tech in their creative workflows and then once we've validated something through this proof of concept phase and we feel confident about it, then we would package it up as a proposal and bring it back into the product R and D, propose it to them and then help them to integrate it in their kind of one to three, one to five year product road map. We do have a proof of concept in the world right now, it's called Tone Explorer and this is a neural network based web application that studies MIDI phrases that can either be played in real time into the app or imported as a MIDI file and then we'll propose tones that match as determined by the neural network, that match this phrase and presents it in some really interesting interfaces and the typical of what our thinking is around AI, we're thinking about things that help and support and enhance and augment all of those great words rather than displace human in the loop in the creative workflows and you know, we think that this is a problem that many people have, they're surrounded by potentially tens of thousands of sounds working in a DAW environment and how do I possibly wade through and find just those perfect matches to the music that I'm writing? So that's a little bit about role and Future Design Lab. It's not just AI, we're looking at immersive experiences, we're looking at connectivity, we're looking at accessibility, we're charged with leading digital transformation from a technology perspective inside the company as well, so lots of really interesting things to keep us thinking all around the clock. Before that I've done a variety of jobs. I've been with Roland for over 30 years. My background is product, I'm a a synth player, composer, sound designer, sequencer type guy who's actually first instrument was trumpet and then that, twist and turns led me into the world of electronics in high school and that's kind of been my centrepoint. I've been, I've served as a product specialist, a product manager, a marketing manager, a leader of global customer experience, I was the CEO of our Canadian company for almost 10 years before moving with my family to Los Angeles and starting to work more directly for Roland Corporation Japan, which is who I work for now. Nick Rothwell: Okay and I guess the follow-on question is, how did you get involved with the Guthman Prize? Paul McCabe: I was approached in a dark alley. Nick Rothwell: Comes to all of us. Paul McCabe: No, it was an outreach. I actually don't remember exactly how the invitation formed. Actually no I do, sorry, it was a gentleman named Gil Weinberg who is on the faculty of Georgia Tech and does some fascinating work that we could easily lose five hours of conversation to. Gil and I had communicated by email and then we met at a NAMM show, one of the smaller NAMM shows just post Covid and kind of immediately clicked. Gil's just one of those fascinating people that you're just happy to know and I could tell that right away and either then or shortly thereafter, he talked to me about the Guthman musical instrument competition. I'd heard about it but I'd never fully leaned into it. As soon as I started looking at it, I was just captivated by, by the story and I couldn't believe that something like this existed and I couldn't believe that I hadn't been a fan of it for 20 years, but in any case he'd said would you ever be interested in perhaps participating as a judge and I said sure, what does that mean and we communicated a little bit more and then the opportunity came for this year and I am beyond happy that I said yes, that the invitation came, that I accepted it and spent, you know, about half a week just in an amazing environment. Nick Rothwell: I was gonna ask about the judging process. Were you actually there in person seeing the instruments actually in the flesh as it were? Paul McCabe: Absolutely and now having been through this experience, I don't think there's, I don't think this is possible to do remotely. These are musical instruments, they're creatures and you need to see them, touch them, smell them, play them, you know. I think pretty much all of the instruments, all of the judges played, we got our hands on them as well. You need to just let these happenstance conversations happen with the creators of these instruments, you know, because often they're so kind of focused in their world, they're actually not accustomed to telling the story of what led them to this work of art that they've created and so you have to just be patient with that conversation and let it steep and come back and visit it again, as we did many times over the couple of days that we were kind of in this really concentrated environment with the creators of these instruments and that was really the only way I think that we could bring ourselves to the point where we could possibly award prizes, you know. Jeff could talk more about this, but the 10 entries that were there were already winners, they'd already stood out from a list of entries and so there was already achievement and it was our job to try and find those stories that were exceptional in some way. It was really hard but it was also absolutely joyous to go through the process as well. Nick Rothwell: I guess you're meeting lots of individuals who have been kind of tooling away for years on their own personal ideas, so kind of pulling out of them a story, a narrative that you can kind of then contextualize must be a bit of a challenge as well. Paul McCabe: It is, and you know it's, I think that's, again perhaps Jeff can speak a little bit more to this, but there's such a spectrum of instrument builders that are represented there, you're absolutely right. There's, you know, for example, the Mulatar, this beautifully hand-built, the judges, we said, you know, this instrument, what's so remarkable about it, is it looks like an ancient instrument that is brand new and you don't often find yourself in the presence of something like that and you know, we saw some video of the 200 plus hours that go into just building one instrument and that's not considering all of the design iterations that led up to that, but then you've got other builders where it was clear that a lot of their work kind of emanated from platforms like Macs and where they were prototyping sound generation and signal flow and whatnot in Macs and then it was kind of, okay, now how do I want to interact with this physically and kind of everything in between that is I think what we were able to experience. Nick Rothwell: Yeah, I may come back to that, but it seems looking at the winners that there's a mix of digital audio, electronic processing, acoustic processing and it's really kind of all over the shop. Jeff Albert: Sure, we have, we get things that are completely acoustic instruments to things that are completely digital instruments and we also often, and the finalists get a sort of a range. We had a few this year that are already in the early sort of commercial stages, they're starting to commercialise the thing, a couple of these you can buy if you have, if you know how to find them and then one of the ones that got a, you know, commendation from the judges was like literally built by this young man in his garage with, you know, leftover laptop parts and things, you know so you, we sort of get both ends of those extremes and I'll tell you a little more about the process we were talking about. So we had three judges for the finals weekend, Paul and King Britt and Leticia Sonami and we try to balance when we choose the judges. Gil and I said, Gil's the Gil Weinberg who Paul mentions, the director for the Center for Music Technology at Georgia Tech, so he's part of this process as well and we sit down and think about like, okay, who do we know, what would make an interesting judging panel and we try to balance artistic practitioners and academics and industry folks, although there's always overlap, right like Paul here as an industry person, but he's also an artistic practitioner. You know, King Britt teaches at University California, San Diego, but everyone really probably knows him more as an artist than as an academic and Leticia also lives across those spaces. But the original submissions which happen in the fall, we usually get 60 to a hundred submissions and those are narrowed down to the finalists by a group of Georgia Tech faculty and also some Atlanta area musicians sometimes but then the final, and that's all done from video and online submissions and Paul's right, it's very difficult to like really get a sense of what the things are from the video and then when the finalists come in, we have the outside judges come and it's funny, even having chosen them from the videos when they show up and you see them in person, sometimes you realise, oh that's a very different, the actual essence of that instrument is different from what I thought it was from the video presentation. Nick Rothwell: Okay, so making the face-to-face really an important part of the process. Jeff Albert: Yeah, or hearing it in more of a context, more than just a couple of minutes. Paul McCabe: For me, one of the things that really stood out was how the personality of these instruments actually evolved. Even within those two days that we were together in the different settings they were put in because they were workshopped, we had kind of standup personalised demos and that was the first day and you've kind of finished that and you kind of, okay, I think I've got the kind of the lay of the land here but then you get to the evening concert and now you see them in that performance context and now you're not only seeing the personality of the instrument really start to come out, but you're seeing the personality of the builder, the musician that's been chosen to help them showcase the instrument and performance as well and the judges were sitting together in the audience and there were three or four times where we kind of looked at each other, we're going wow, like we were all impressed with some different dimension of an instrument that stood out in that live performance concert venue context. Nick Rothwell: Okay, I'm gonna roll back a bit. I think, 'cause I'd like to get a sense of the start of the prize really which was what, 27 years ago as a keyboard prize and get a sense of how it's evolved and what things you are seeing now with the current shortlisted prize winners compared to what they were like a few years ago and whether you got some sort of sense of how this craft of instrument making is kind of slowly changing. Could we kind of get some historical context, would that be possible? Jeff Albert: Sure, so I'll, I'll give the the quick history lesson. It started in the 1990s. Richard Guthman was a Georgia Tech graduate and he wanted to give back to the institute and support music. His wife Margaret was a pianist, so it started as a piano competition and there was a jazz category and a classical category and it was doing fine. I think the family really wanted something that would sort of stand out in the music world and there are lots of piano competitions, so standing out as a piano competition wasn't all that easy. At the time our music technology degrees were developing and so someone had the idea, well what if we make it a musical instrument competition it's, you know, what we're doing, we have students building new technology, what if we showcase all the great new musical instrument ideas from around the world. So in the mid two thousands it made that shift from piano competition to musical instrument competition and it's really taken off since then. I don't know that I can speak real well to trends 'cause I feel like it's a little like fashion, things sort of come and go. There are often broad categories that you see. It seems like every year we have a, like a magnetic field instrument and the winner this year, the Chromaplane was one of those and I will say that that one I think was the sort of most musically responsive and elegantly assembled version of magnetic field instruments that we've seen and there are also, we had a lot of, if I had to pick a trend for this year, there was a lot of interest in microtonal instruments. A lot of the things that came in had a, we're looking for expressive ways to get between the equal temperament that we're used to, that seemed to be the trend for me this year. Nick Rothwell: Yeah, I think on that there are quite a lot of kind of trends and technologies helping with that. When we first got MPE polyphonic expression that meant we could micro tune, when we first got keyboards where they can respond to per key pitch that was kind of opening the door to this kind of micro toning or micro tuning and you know, after the tyranny of decades of the piano keyboard, it's kind of good that we're getting there. Jeff Albert: Well as a trombonist I've been playing in the cracks for years but I'm... Nick Rothwell: Okay and also I was looking through the past winners and we got Teenage Engineering are there with their lovely little boutique systems and ROLI. Oo I interviewed Roland Lamb quite a few months ago. Again his interest was essentially taking a conventional keyboard and making it responsive with per key response, continuous control and tunings and we can kind of come back to that because there were particular things that Roland was trying to achieve to make his instrument into a commercial success. But in terms of the winners here, you picked up on the Chromaplane. I think that was probably my favorite as well, it just seemed such a rich, organic sound and I believe they actually are shipping them now to, did they, have done a Kickstarter campaign or something similar, because people are starting to receive them. Jeff Albert: I think they did, yeah. Paul McCabe: Yes they did and they're actually working on, and I think they even performed a little bit on the second iteration of the instrument, which moved more towards a sampling and sample playback as a sound source as opposed to the analogue engine that's in the first generation of the product. Nick Rothwell: That's what I was trying to work out because it looks like it has an audio input, so you could feed it arbitrary recordings and it would then process them in the analogue domain. Paul McCabe: Yeah, that's right. I can't, we can't speak too much yet about the PCM version. We asked some questions and got a little bit of understanding but yeah, it's got multiple audio inputs that presumably allow for some real-time processing as you're performing on the electromagnetic field surface with the isomorphic zones on the top of the instrument as well and yeah, we were able to get, in the judging process, we were able to get, refine the list of 10 to a list of five or six with pretty reasonable agreement between the judges - reasonable agreement - with agreement between the judges. Going from there is what really took the time but Chromoplane eventually did rise up as that instrument that really pushed and checked all of the boxes of this rubric that we created to try and standardise our conversation, if you will, across all of these wide variety of different instruments. It, you know, it presented kind of a new form of expression, it was musical, it was compelling when, we all wanted to try it when we saw it first performed, every one of us wanted to, you know, I want to try that, there was an immediacy to the interface that was really intriguing and then as soon as you try it, we wanted to try and get better at that and that was one of the things that we were looking for was does the instrument kind of propose or does it suggest a kind of a path to virtuosity that will keep you engaged with it and wanting to continue to improve your skills with it and Chromaplane, I mean they all showed signs in each of these areas, but Chromaplane for us really stood out. Nick Rothwell: So one shout out I'm gonna give is for the dinosaur head modelling, because I think that was just completely bonkers and it sounded great. Paul McCabe: Yeah. Jeff, I'm sure you'll have something to say about that, I can certainly speak from the judge's perspective as well. Jeff Albert: Actually, I want to tell your story, Paul. I love when, so when they announced the awards at the end of the concert, Paul like really framed them really well and one of the things he said about this instrument was I never really thought I could develop empathy with something that lived millions of years ago, but the idea of imagining what this possibly could have sounded like really made me feel some empathy for the thing and I thought that was a really deep way to look at it and just on the surface level of, I would love it for all of the eight year olds in Atlanta to come hear the dinosaur and get excited about making cool things. It also is like just, it makes you consider history in a way that we wouldn't do otherwise and the idea of using the expression of a musical instrument as a way to really make us examine our humanity on a deeper level, like I think that's the most important thing we can do with what we as musicians and inventors and technologists have. Paul McCabe: Yeah and you know, we talk about journeys to the final result, the research that Courtney reviewed and assembled and considered on the path to building this instrument was extraordinary. It was actually quite funny. All the judges were commenting that clearly she was the smartest person in the room and she would, in conversation she would start talking to us about these 12 syllable dinosaur names as though it was a cup of coffee and we'd all be nodding our heads saying, oh yeah that one, oh yeah of course that and you just do it so innocently that it was, that was quite charming. But the instrument itself, as Jeff was saying there's, you know, all three of the winners we talked about there, them occupying a different space in history and the dinosaur choir, you know, pre-human history and as Jeff was saying, for me there was really two narratives to this, there was two stories of the instrument. There was this story that compelled you to look back and you know, certainly for me who as a kid and as I'm sure many of us did, you grew up with a fascination for firetrucks and dinosaurs and astronauts, in some balance and certainly I was really interested in dinosaurs and knew all of the names of the 10 dominant dinosaur types and whatnot and, but we also grow up with what Hollywood has taught us they sound like, which is pitch down dinosaurs and, or sorry, pitch down lions and tigers and you know, later lots of processing whatnot, all to kind of help elevate this ferocity, but in reality as we learned and as Courtney always was very careful to do, she says maybe she would always, because she would say we'll never know definitively because we can't restore the tissues,, the tissue and the muscles that went into all of what becomes the voice box of a dinosaur so we have to postulate and we hypothesise and you know, this hypothesis has a lot of research to back it but as she says, it comes with some controversy as well, but maybe dinosaurs sounded much more like birds, very loud, very large at times, potentially very angry birds. I caught myself saying that but I was already committed so I just had to go with it, yeah. In any case as I said to her, I said well I don't think I'll ever watch Jurassic Park in the same way again, because my own impression of that era is being, you know, rewritten as I speak with you. But then the other narrative of course, is using this as a musical instrument and you know, thinking about the idea of being able to inject your own personality and your own dynamics and your own expression into this dinosaur head and have it vocalise something that's a reflection of what you're trying to ingest, what you're trying to impart on it is just remarkable and she talked about the desire to have choirs, she has ideas for different dinosaur heads. That was another interesting thing is that it looked a little bit hodgepodge, it absolutely wasn't. The base was, you know, very much the base of the entire system and this 3D printed dinosaur head attached to it and there's a modularity to it where in her plans, she intends to develop other dinosaur heads and other models for them that will run and allow you to perform as well. So yeah, really remarkable. Nick Rothwell: Yeah, I think I was really impressed that it just seemed to be a fully formed high quality academic study as well as a practical exercise. Paul McCabe: Well and really multiple studies, just the amount of research that she considered to, you know, build her own researcher and her own theories and propositions was again, now she's only scratching the surface as she tried to describe it to us. Nick Rothwell: Okay, so you mentioned earlier about judging rubrics. I'd like to kind of end on that and I guess end on a slightly more philosophical discussion maybe about, with a competition like this, as I said at the beginning you get kind of solo inventors, performers who turn up with their instruments and they may not be interested in everybody else being able to play them as long as they can express themselves and I get, I guess you get people doing Kickstarters because they think there's something about what they've done that generalises or is more accessible or is potentially more commercial. So I'm kind of interested in how you feel about that spread from, you know, the one person's solo instrument to something that could be generalised and whether these things should be easy to play or whether they require virtuosity. Did that kind of come into your judging rubrics, or is that something you can kind of expand on? Jeff Albert: Let me preface that with, people often ask me, well what are the rules, to which I respond, creativity has no rules, so it is really hard to say oh, it has to be this or it has to be that and the way it gets judged from year to year does vary some given who the jury is and the sort of what they bring to it. Although we do have, you know, Gil usually sits the judges down and says these are some ways it's been thought about in the past, you know, now take that to use. I will say we had a panel with the judges, where I asked Laetitia how she thinks about her instruments, you know, and other people playing them, you know, because she's built the Lady's Glove and the Spring Spyre and all these things and she was very quick to say, I build these for my personal expression, I do not think about other people playing them. But obviously some of our, the finalists, you know, are commercialising as you say, things, so they do. So I just wanted to put out that there's a variety of answers there and we try not to be proscriptive in saying to win the competition or to make the finals, it has to be X. You know, it can be very personal, it can also be very general. So Paul, you can maybe talk about how y'all thought about it this year a little bit. Paul McCabe: Yeah, for sure and I am a systems and structure guy, partly because I think and especially now with the role in Future Design Lab, the field of possibilities is immense and somehow we have to find ways to bring some order to things so that we can determine priorities, areas of interest, levels of investment of time and energy and money and what have you, that we have to bring some structure to this and I'd like to think that that's one of the things that I bring to the role in Future Design Lab. I was also, and I think there's probably a hint in here, one of the earliest kind of pop music band, I actually before that, when I was studying classical music, it was always I was interested in any kinds of music that reflected counterpoint, a different species of counterpoint. So all of these, you know, kind of interconnected lines and interdependent lines was always really interesting to me. Stands to reason that one of the first pop bands that I fell in love with was Kraftwerk and so kind of if I just leave that there, you probably understand how I got to a spreadsheet for this competition as well but having said that, Gil did sit us down and say, you know, last year, in fact the 2024 competition, somebody did develop a bit of a rubric that I'll share with you, you don't have to use it, it was interesting and it did inform some of our thinking, but I'd also just, not knowing how this was even going to work when we got together, would each judge just kind of work on their own and then we'd come together and hash it out and somehow come up with a result or would we be very, very collaborative? What was so great was the, I think the combination of King and Laetitia and myself was really, it was really almost a perfect combination because of the different areas of thinking that we represented yet we were able, there was a nexus that sat between us that we were all very comfortable with each other and disagreement was never really disagreement, it was just something to consider, something else to consider, so I really loved the process of working with them. Regardless I'd, in the days leading up to the competition as I've got this swirling mass of how will we think about this? I codified it down to, I think it was 10 different dimensions that I, if I'm just thinking about this, this is what I'll probably try and focus on and then I shared those with the other judges and we made a few changes, but we ultimately kind of adopted that to give ourselves a bit of a common operating system for the conversation and I'll, if it's of interest, I can share those with you quickly. We thought about is the instrument approachable and intuitive and if you go back to that conversation about the Chromaplane, that as an example but not just the Chromaplane, but that was one instrument where we all felt we want to try that we, you know, we understand the basic performance mechanics without touching it, we want to try it and there was that kind of compelling moment and in those first moments with it, can I, is that kind of initial onboarding, can I make some progress quickly and feel like I have an opportunity to make music with this instrument? Is the instrument evocative, does it inspire virtuosity and so again when I was talking about the Chromoplane, does it kind of compel you to want to get better at it and can you imagine being on a journey of improvement with the instrument over time. Of course, is it expressive. It's a very wide term but all of the instruments were expressive in their own in their own ways, all 10 entries, obviously. Is there some form of sonic innovation that the instrument embodies, am I hearing something new and that doesn't mean to be like an entirely new form of synthesis, but is the combination of the sound and the performance expression that I'm hearing create something that's new and so that was one. Is it versatile, you know, is it a one trick pony and what I'm hearing is about what it is and it might be hard to imagine a two hour concert with this or to hear it set in different musical contexts or you can, is it potentially musically adaptable and can I imagine, for example, different players developing their own creative voice that I can hear through the instrument? Is it welcome, does it solve a problem and there were a couple of instruments that were problem solvers. The ModμMIDI was, Emily started that and we talked about her as being on a mission. She really had no intention of building an instrument that people could buy, she wanted to create a platform upon which people could enjoy microtonal music and she just, and she arrived at key, she didn't know how to build a keyboard, she met friends that could help her do that and 3D print parts and whatnot and her intention was to just I want to open source this just so that people can have some way that they can try microtonal music and so that was a problem, an example of a problem solver. Is it beautiful, you know, so much of that early relationship with a musical instrument comes from visual and not what we hear and I imagine myself playing it, that's what draws me in, I wanna hold it, I wanna be seen holding it, I wanna be associated with this thing, to me it's beautiful. Is it ergonomic, can it be held or interacted with physically as a musical instrument, are the things placed in a way that you can imagine a performance flow being developed or is it one where okay yeah, all of these pieces are interesting, but I'm gonna be, I'm having a difficult time imagining how I would actually develop a performance style with it. Quality and craftsmanship, they go without saying and even for the instruments that had kind of just been born on the bench, you know, we were looking for signs that there, you know, is what's there, was there consideration given to it, is there, you know, from the Roland perspective, something that we're always very cognizant of and this was Mr. Takahashi's mandate, was that we never want to put something into a musician's hands that's gonna break because when it breaks you lose trust in a way that you may never regain. Now these, with one or two exceptions, these aren't commercially available products but can we either see the essence of quality and craftsmanship, or can we imagine this being crafted in a way that is gonna make it, you know, an enduring robust instrument and then the last one was the X factor. Is there something, is there just something to this and the Dinosaur choir being an example of the X factor where there's these two stories and this idea that this instrument is really causing me to think back to a time and kind of reframe my understanding of it is one example. Nick Rothwell: Well it seems to me from just looking at the 10 finalists, you've got a huge range there from individual instruments through to things that are kind of on the verge of becoming commercials. It seems like that rubric has kind of stood you well in terms of giving you good quality submissions from a broad range of backgrounds and approaches. Paul McCabe: Well yeah and again that wasn't used to evaluate the entries, so that was really used when we were there to help us and we didn't use it in a strict sense. I mean, I did because again, Kraftwerk, I did but we it gave us something as I mentioned, a common operating system, we could talk about these and it helped us to kind of focus in on what we liked or what we were challenged by in a given entry and then ultimately to rank them, which was really difficult. Nick Rothwell: Well, I'm aware that time is rolling on but it's been a fascinating talk and I say, given that we've got Teenage Engineering and ROLI have kind of come through this path, that'd be really interesting to look back in a couple of years and see which of these potential finalists are kind of out there in the world, though I've gotta say I've got in my head now, an image of a dinosaur skull with a Roland logo planted on the side of it. If you could make that happen for me. Paul McCabe: Well if I could make that happen for me, that would be something of a dream and yeah, we'll see, who knows, who knows right. Nick Rothwell: Who knows Indeed, yeah. Well I'll say Jeff and Paul, thank-you so much. I mean, it's been a long podcast but it's been a really interesting one and it's clear there's a lot of really good work going on here and creative work and you know, it's got a good kind of vibe about it. So yeah, thank-you very much for joining us. Jeff Albert: Great, thanks for having us Nick, it's been a pleasure. Paul McCabe: My pleasure entirely. Nick Rothwell: Thank-you for listening and be sure to check out the show notes page for this episode where you'll find further information along with web links and details of all the other episodes. And just before you go, let me point you to the soundonsound.com/podcasts website page where you can explore what's playing on our other channels. This has been a Project Cassiel production by me, Nick Rothwell for Sound On Sound.