VentureBeat

Smule — the startup behind iPhone application Ocarina, which transforms your phone into a musical instrument — just announced the winners of “This Contest Blows,” who will receive $1,000 each for delivering the best Ocarina performances and sharing the videos on YouTube. While there aren’t any mind-blowing displays of unimpeachable musical talent, it’s definitely a nice showcase of what users can do with the app.

Here are the winners:

* Hardrockgrl’s “Oh Shenandoah ”
* David Choi’s cover of “Hot N Cold ” (see video below)
* “Sadness and Sorrow”
* Monkey Head
* Good sleep, fast sleep
* Greetings from Hungary
* “Whistle Stop”
* “Carol of the Bells”
* “Song of Storms”
* “Music of the Nose.” (This is the nose-blowing performance of “Music of the Night” that I previously posted; Smule says this winner will get a box of Kleenex and a bottle of Purell hand sanitizer, too.)

To this list, I’d probably add the Stanford Mobile Phone Orchestra’s stirring cover of “Stairway to Heaven” at this year’s Crunchies, led by Smule co-founder Ge Wang.

Of course, as with any YouTube contest, there were some odd entries too. Sometimes, the oddness transcended the purely eccentric into true awesomeness (see: “Music of the Nose”), and sometimes it remained merely odd. For example, users submitted videos of a cat playing the Ocarina and someone playing the Ocarina with his, um, posterior.

Smule’s most recent product (which isn’t quite as cool as Ocarina) is a holiday-themed app called Zephyr.

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Tags: co:Smule