Every year, Georgia Tech’s Guthman Musical Instrument Competition gathers the world’s most over-educated tinkerers to solve problems that literally no musician has ever had. This year’s finalists are, as the Verge so delicately puts it, an “impressive collection of oddballs.” If by “impressive” you mean “expensive ways to make noises that sound like a dial-up modem having a panic attack,” then yes, the bar is in the stratosphere.

Let’s start with the “playable henge of fiddles.” Because if there is one thing the world of classical music was missing, it was a way to make the violin even more pretentious and physically demanding. The claim here is that arranging fiddles in a circle creates a “henge.” In reality, it creates a claustrophobic nightmare for any performer who isn’t interested in being part of a Pagan ritual just to play a G-major scale. It’s not a new instrument; it’s just a furniture arrangement that makes transportation an absolute logistical suicide mission. Good luck getting that through the door of a jazz club.

Then we have the Amphibian Modules, a modular synth that swaps patch cables for a dish of saltwater. Finally, a way to combine electricity and water in a way that feels both pretentious and dangerous. The assumption here is that patch cables—the industry standard for a reason—were just too reliable and lacked the necessary “corrosion and evaporation” variables. We get it, you took Chem 101. But unless your goal is to have your “instrument” slowly turn into a bowl of briny crust while posing a mild electrocution risk to the front row, maybe stick to the cables. It’s a musical toaster bath, and calling it “innovative” is a brave leap for anyone who values their insurance premium.

The Gajveena also makes an appearance, because apparently, the double bass wasn’t already heavy or cumbersome enough. The “innovation” here is combining it with a traditional Indian instrument. While the cultural fusion is lovely in theory, the physical reality is the “Turducken” of the music world. It’s a Frankenstein’s monster of ergonomics that looks like it was designed specifically to keep chiropractors in business for the next three decades. Why play one instrument well when you can play two instruments poorly while developing scoliosis?

The competition boasts that past finalists include the founders of Teenage Engineering and Roli. This is the ultimate “look at our successful older siblings” argument. It assumes that because the OP-1 is a cult classic, a saltwater-powered fiddle-circle is the next logical step in human evolution. Roli gave us the Seaboard; these finalists are giving us high-concept clutter. $10,000 in prize money is a nice gesture, but for the amount of engineering hours spent making a fiddle-henge, these inventors are essentially working for about four cents an hour.

We are told these are “new” instruments, but they feel more like solutions looking for problems that don’t exist. We don’t need a synth that requires a PhD in fluid dynamics to operate; we need instruments that people actually want to play for more than five minutes before realizing they could have just bought a MIDI controller and a bottle of Advil for a fraction of the cost. Innovation is great, but at some point, “new” just becomes “unnecessarily difficult,” and the Guthman competition seems to be the annual Olympics for the latter. Keep the salt out of the synths and the fiddles off the floor, and maybe we’ll actually have something to listen to.