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.
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.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.
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.