Yes, but is it music? If someone out there isn’t muttering this by the end of this page, my name’s Karlheinz Stockhausen. Why? Because I’m about to describe the shortlist for the biggest composition prize in British music: the PRS Foundation’s New Music Award, which will announce on Monday who gets £50,000 to create a wacky new work. It’s been called contemporary music’s answer to the Turner Prize – and you’ll see why.

The first contender is Robert Jarvis, who is proposing to create a chorus of bats. No, that’s not a metaphor or a misprint. Called Echolocation, his piece will record the ultrasonic nocturnal squeaks of the thousands of bats winging round the London Wetland Centre. He will then use a computer to sequence the sounds (according to an “algorithmic” formula he has devised), bring them within human hearing, and then replay them at the site during the day to create a “four-dimensional experience” for visitors. This operation will be repeated night and day for four months.

Too batty for words? How about Pedal Tones, then? Devised by jazz pianist Django Bates, it comprises an ordinary bicycle adapted so that the pedals operate four music boxes. Each plays a different voice of a four-part contrapuntal piece composed by Bates. Oh, and the piece will last one year – enough time for the bike to be ridden round Britain in what Bates hopes will be a “celebration of quintessential British eccentricity”.

Carousel Commission gives another great Victorian invention a 21st-century makeover. This time it’s the carousel organ on Brighton beach, regarded as the world’s finest, and yet – according to the folk-singer Eliza Carthy, rock musician David Thomas and avant-garde director Adam Bushell – never before supplied with music specially written for it. So that’s what they are proposing: incorporating the carousel into a communal event involving professional musicians and hundreds of schoolchildren on Brighton seafront.

The other three proposals are just as eye-popping. A Concerto for Beatboxer and Orchestra (beatboxing being the art of making rap-style percussion sounds with your mouth) is suggested by the beatboxer Shlomo and composer Anna Meredith. The Anglo-Zimbabwean singer/songwriter Netsayi Chigwendere proposes an operetta that will mix “Shona praise poetry with urban slam, Western classical strings with rustic folk”, and address “complicated political and philosophical questions”. And a project called The Fragmented Orchestra, by a team based at Plymouth University, will – if I understand it correctly, which I probably don’t – buzz sounds between 24 locations across Britain (including a football stadium, school playgrounds and motorway crash barriers) to imitate the activity of neurons within the brain’s cortex.

Behind this extraordinary award is the Performing Right Society, which collects royalties for composers. It wants the prize to “ignite the imagination of the creative community and dramatically raise the profile and level of debate around contemporary British music”. That’s a laudable aim. Avant-garde musicians look with envy at the huge media interest generated by their visual-arts equivalents – the likes of Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin. Perhaps a bat chorus or a contrapuntal bicycle will redress the balance.

But is it music?

www.prsfoundation.co.uk/newmusicaward

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