The Sophtar has been selected as one the ten finalists in this year’s Guthman Musical Instrument Competition.
Together with Sukandar Kartadinata, we will bring the instrument to the Georgia Tech campus in Atlanta (US) to present it to the competition’s judges and participate in a public performance involving local Atlanta musicians.
I designed the Sophtar and built it in collaboration with Kartadinata. At the Intelligent Instruments Lab, the Sophtar was extended with actuators, on-board DSP, and machine learning models to make it respond to the player in ways that are not easy to predict yet meaningful and inspiring.
Read more about the Sophtar here and check out all the finalists in this year’s compeition here.
The Sophtar has been developed with the support of the GEMM))) research cluster at Luleå University of Technology, the Intelligent Instruments Lab at University of Iceland, the European Research Council, the Swedish Research Council, the Boström Fund, and the Helge Ax:son Johnsons foundation.