LIBERACE - A Rock Audio Tournament (March 27-April 7)

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LIBERACE - A Rock Audio Tournament (March 27-April 7)

Post by gyre and gimble »

Hi everyone,

I am pleased to announce LIBERACE, an upcoming online audio tournament dedicated to rock music and its related antecedents, adjacents, and offshoots. The tournament will be written by myself, Kyle Sutherlin, and Nathan Weiser. It will start on March 27 and run until April 7.

Format: We are pleased to announce that this tournament, like PAveMEnT and other recent audio tournaments, will be hosted by Noah Prince’s excellent Qblitz site.

We are waiting to announce our exact tournament format pending the results of the interest poll, but we anticipate a tournament structure similar to PAveMEnT and MARCATo: a seeding round, followed by a round robin, followed by a re-seeding, followed by another round robin, followed by a cross-bracket placement game. We are currently planning to produce 12 rounds of 20 tossups each.

Here is a description of the QBlitz playing format plagiarized from John Lawrence’s MARCATo announcement.
ThisIsMyUsername wrote: Wed May 27, 2020 12:54 am The basic format of the tournament is as follows: Rounds are spread over multiple days, one round per day. On each game day, each two-person team is paired with an opposing team. Each player is sent a link to the 20 tossups for that round. Each tossup is constructed as it would be in Imaginary Landscape: one minute of (usually) six clips, arranged in pyramidal order. The playing mechanics are much as they are on Qblitz and Buzzword: the question is "read" to each player alone, they buzz, type in an answer, and the computer records where they buzzed and what answer they gave. The earliest buzz from each team counts as that team's buzz on the question. If both teams give the correct answer, only the earlier correct buzz earns points. Tossups are worth 10, and negs are worth -5. The higher-scoring team in each head-to-head is the wins that game.
Difficulty: For those of you who played PAveMEnT, this set will be noticeably harder, but not substantially. We are striving to keep this set as accessible as possible, while at the same time filling out a 240-question answer space with rock or rock-related topics. For the most part, the questions will be on "core" or "canonical" music. That said, familiarity with many of those topics will require some degree of active interest in or engagement with rock music and its neighbors. Things like seeking out new music to listen to, sharing or exchanging music with friends, or frequenting real or virtual radio stations will get you much of the way there. You don't have to read Pitchfork regularly to be able to answer questions. And we certainly don't mean to discourage. If you like rock music, there will almost certainly be something here for you.

Questions: Questions will be audio clips, generally between 60 and 70 seconds long, with 6 or 7 separate audio clips pointing to the answer. Questions will be preceded by a prompt (e.g., “Name the artist,” “Name the album,” or “Give the first word in the titles of these songs”). They will be accessed in .mp3 format through the Qblitz platform.

Distribution: We will roughly be following the distribution below. But as you can see, the categories are not mutually exclusive. This distribution represents the minimum number of each category that will appear in a given round.

1 Roots / Rock-Adjacent Genre (e.g., Blues, Jazz, R&B, Soul, etc.)
2 1960s
2 1970s
2 1980s
1 1990s
1 2000s
1 2010s / 2020s
1 Hard Rock / Guitar Rock
1 Folk / Folk Rock
1 Pre-2000 Alternative Rock
1 2000s Alternative Rock
1 2010s / 2020s Alternative Rock
1 Electronic / Dance / Experimental
1 Other Media / Miscellaneous (e.g., Film, Musicals, etc.)
2 Common Link
1 Our Choice

Entry Fee: This event will cost $10 per person, to be paid through Qblitz once registration opens officially.

Dates: We would like to run this sometime late-March/early-April. As with prior audio tournaments, there will be one round played per day. Because gameplay is asynchronous, you, your teammate, and your opponents can play at different times during the day. We will update this section and the thread title with the actual date once we receive enough responses to the Google form below.

Registration: Registration will be done through Qblitz. Please use the following link: https://www.qblitz.online/?w=events&s=LIBERACE

Team Formation: Here's an informal team formation sheet. Please note that this is purely for facilitating team formation, and that listing yourself here will not reserve you a spot in the field (should it fill up). That said, please do add yourself to this spreadsheet if you register so others have a sense of how the field is shaping up.
Last edited by gyre and gimble on Fri Feb 19, 2021 2:02 am, edited 2 times in total.
Stephen Liu
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Re: LIBERACE - A Rock Audio Tournament (March/April)

Post by gyre and gimble »

If you're at all interested, please fill out the poll! We would like to settle on a start date fairly soon, and will probably close the poll on February 7.
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Re: LIBERACE - A Rock Audio Tournament (March 27-April 7)

Post by gyre and gimble »

We've settled on March 27-April 7 for this tournament. Thanks to everyone who filled out the poll!

Here's an informal team formation spreadsheet:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... edit#gid=0

Please note that registration will officially be done through Qblitz. I will post here again with updated details on that.
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Re: LIBERACE - A Rock Audio Tournament (March 27-April 7)

Post by gyre and gimble »

Hi everyone,

Registration on Qblitz is now live. Please make sure to register if you intend to play. If you do not register on Qblitz, you will not play, even if you have "signed up" with a team in the team formation sheet.

https://www.qblitz.online/?w=events&s=LIBERACE

Thanks!
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Re: LIBERACE - A Rock Audio Tournament (March 27-April 7)

Post by gyre and gimble »

I'm pleased to report that the question set is now complete.

We will be setting an initial field cap at 36 teams. We might not get there, but do please register as soon as you can so we have an accurate count.
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Re: LIBERACE - A Rock Audio Tournament (March 27-April 7)

Post by gyre and gimble »

We're less than a week away until the first round of competition! Please make sure you register on Qblitz. We will be closing registration end-of-day Thursday (Pacific time).
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Re: LIBERACE - A Rock Audio Tournament (March 27-April 7)

Post by AKKOLADE »

I just registered. I'm still looking for a partner.
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Re: LIBERACE - A Rock Audio Tournament (March 27-April 7)

Post by Gene Harrogate »

Minor question: will we be able to give our teams names, or will it stay as "X's team"?
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Re: LIBERACE - A Rock Audio Tournament (March 27-April 7)

Post by Dominator »

As a reminder, the registration deadline for teams is almost here. There are several teams listed on the spreadsheet that have not registered. In order to actually play, you need to make sure that:
  • Both players have Qblitz accounts. (Create one here if you need to - it's really quick.)
  • Exactly one of the players has registered a team from this Qblitz page.
If your team's row in the spreadsheet is green, you're good to go.

If you'd like to change your team name, put the desired name in the spreadsheet and I'll change it for you in Qblitz.
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Re: LIBERACE - A Rock Audio Tournament (March 27-April 7)

Post by gyre and gimble »

LIBERACE kicks off tomorrow morning! Registered teams should have received a logistics/introductory email from Qblitz today. On behalf of the writing team, I hope everyone enjoys the set, and we are very excited to see your great buzzes.

For teams who have not included a team name in the team formation spreadsheet, please do so by midnight Central time if you have a preferred team name. If you do not, we will happily add one for you.
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Re: LIBERACE - A Rock Audio Tournament (March 27-April 7)

Post by AKKOLADE »

This event owns so far. If you didn't register, you're missing out.
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Re: LIBERACE - A Rock Audio Tournament (March 27-April 7)

Post by StabbedCat »

This whole event was heater, would strongly recommend others sign up for future mirrors.
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Re: LIBERACE - A Rock Audio Tournament (March 27-April 7)

Post by ValenciaQBowl »

I know Noah and the team are working through some bugs to get the final results for LIBERACE out, but there's no reason to wait to say that this was FANTASTIC. As was true for PAVEMENT and MARCATO, the QBLITZ interface and functionality is just great, but for me personally I enjoyed this audio tournament more than those two (no knock on those, which were similarly well crafted--I just actually knew a ton more stuff asked about in this one!).

Lots of great clue selection, and I heard some artists that I didn't recognize who I'm now checking out.

Mad props to Stephen, Nathan, and Kyle for a job well done, and of course to Noah for administrating things. (Do you kids give "mad props" anymore? Hmm).
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Re: LIBERACE - A Rock Audio Tournament (March 27-April 7)

Post by vengefulsweatermensch »

Congratulations to Cixi and the Banshees (Evan Nagler & Erik Christensen) for their first place finish at this event! They defeated Melon Commentary and the Infinite Blandness (Ali Saeed & Kazuma Shimanaka) in a close-fought final. I & Love & Thou (Ryan Rosenberg & William Holub-Moorman) claimed third place over "Better": Rhyming With "Fire" Since 1967 (Kenji Shimizu & Thomas De Bock) in a similarly well-contested playoff match.

A kindly reminder that this set is not "clear"; please do not discuss or share question material publicly. We hope to have a private discussion forum up soon. (Admins, did you get our email?)
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Re: LIBERACE - A Rock Audio Tournament (March 27-April 7)

Post by gyre and gimble »

Hi mods, could we get a private discussion forum up for this set? Thanks.
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Re: LIBERACE - A Rock Audio Tournament (March 27-April 7)

Post by Important Bird Area »

gyre and gimble wrote: Sun Apr 11, 2021 9:23 pm Hi mods, could we get a private discussion forum up for this set? Thanks.
This private forum should now be ready to go... our apologies for the delay in setting this up.
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Re: LIBERACE - A Rock Audio Tournament (March 27-April 7)

Post by gyre and gimble »

Thanks Jeff, but maybe it should go in the Trash subforum? I don't think Collegiate Discussion is the right place.
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Re: LIBERACE - A Rock Audio Tournament (March 27-April 7)

Post by Important Bird Area »

That was a strongly-considered statement about the place of 20th-century music in the arts distribution.... scratch that, a mistake, which has now been fixed.
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