Imaginary Landscape no. 1 Discussion

[magin]

Now that the rounds we played after NASAT today are done, this set is now open for discussion.

Thanks to Dave Letzler and John Lawrence for being excellent collaborators on this set. I'd like to know if there are things you thought this set did particularly well, and if there are things we can improve for next time. I saw plenty of solid buzzes, and feel like a tournament like this is a good way to gauge if we're asking about music answers that people know about.

Discuss away.

[Khanate]

I really enjoyed this tournament and the set. Almost all works were pretty well known, so it wasnt like I was just sitting there clueless. I hope someone does this with trash music one day.

[yoda4554]

I'm glad everyone seemed to enjoy the tournament. Hopefully, the questions will be uploaded somewhere soon.

As a note, we used Audacity, a freeware sound-editing program, which works pretty well and is easy to use. (For anyone's future reference--amp the volume, a lot.) Incidentally, given that most tournaments are run on laptops anyway, if people liked the range of things this allowed us to ask about, I don't see any reason why some intrepid TD might not be able to write one or two of these for a finals or playoff packet at a regular tournament.

[theMoMA]

I also used Audacity for my music tournament. It works really well. Also, you can find an audio ripping program to take the music off of YouTube videos, which seems to be the easiest way to get a wide sampling of audio.

[Cheynem]

Yeah, I was going to ask what programs you guys used. I have a lot of ideas for a movie/TV edition of this, but didn't actually have access to a lot of CD's or audio files, so something which could rip stuff from Youtube would be amazing.

[Skepticism and Animal Feed]

There is no need to download software to rip things from youtube. Just search google for "download youtube video" and there are tons of nearly identical websites that will create an mp4 or mp3 of any YouTube video and download it to your computer. All you need to do is copy/paste the URL of the video.

This is how I got the audio/video for that Janos Kadar speech I used in my parody of NAQT's 2010 ICT Announcement.

[Masked Canadian History Bandit]

Incidentally, given that most tournaments are run on laptops anyway, if people liked the range of things this allowed us to ask about, I don't see any reason why some intrepid TD might not be able to write one or two of these for a finals or playoff packet at a regular tournament.

As long as it's not done like VETO and half of the pack is audio/visual and some rounds take up to an hour.

[theMoMA]

I don't see any reason why some intrepid TD might not be able to write one or two of these for a finals or playoff packet at a regular tournament.

In my quizbowl aesthetic, mixed-media questions in regular tournaments would still take the form of a read tossup. It would likely be a recording of the question writer reading text with some interspliced audio clips (i.e. "This piece's second movement contains the following melody [clip plays]. etc. etc."). You could do something similar with visual clips.

[DumbJaques]

George Crumb's Black Angels sucks a really tremendous amount of cock, and entirely ruined my nap.

[magin]

Because these are large files (and I think that mp3s are already compressed and I don't know how to compress them further), I'm going to attempt to post the links to them online. Here are the 8 packets:

Packet 1

Packet 2

Packet 3

Packet 4

Packet 5

Packet 6

Packet 7

Packet 8

Note that the answers to the tossups are revealed in the individual file names, so get someone else to read them to you if you want to play them instead of just listening to them.

[Cody]

For ease of downloading, I've put Rounds 1-8 in zip files in my Dropbox:
Round 1
Round 2
Round 3
Round 4
Round 5
Round 6
Round 7
Round 8

[wd4gdz]

Would it be possible to get a list of what pieces were used in each tossup?

[magin]

Would it be possible to get a list of what pieces were used in each tossup?

Yeah, I should be able to do that.

[Unicolored Jay]

I've been looking through this lately, and I really like this set. Well done.

The only complaint I have so far is small. In the Faure tossup, the Pavane, Op. 50 showed up much earlier than I expected for it to, since it's a standard piece in the orchestra repertoire. Although, maybe I'm just biased because I played it years ago.

EDIT: Maybe a document of "what to look for in your answer" would be nice? Sometimes I'm guessing composers for a specific work and such.

[magin]

I've been looking through this lately, and I really like this set. Well done.

The only complaint I have so far is small. In the Faure tossup, the Pavane, Op. 50 showed up much earlier than I expected for it to, since it's a standard piece in the orchestra repertoire. Although, maybe I'm just biased because I played it years ago.

EDIT: Maybe a document of "what to look for in your answer" would be nice? Sometimes I'm guessing composers for a specific work and such.

We created a series of google docs with prompts and answer lines; I'll see if I can make those available.

Glad you liked the set.

Also, I was wondering about the possibility of using these kinds of pyramidal audio tossups for regular tournaments. Considering the many pitfalls of music writing for quizbowl (it's easy to choose unhelpful clues when describing a piece of music, since it can be difficult to figure out what aspects of the piece are unique enough to be recognized by players with knowledge), it might be easier for writers to prepare audio tossups instead, since it's much harder to screw those up. These tossups also reward listening to music much more effectively than normal tossups do, and are also a way to prevent a tournament from having a wildly divergent music distribution (it's a lot easier to focus on modern/experimental music in written questions because modern music tends to have a lot of quirks that lend themselves well to written clues).

Admittedly, the volume of these tossups might be a problem, but for a well-organized tournament, it's not hard to procure a few laptop speakers. A small, independent tournament would be the best venue to try incorporating these audio tossups, and I'm curious if these questions can be successfully included in academic tournaments without unduly disrupting the round.

[ThisIsMyUsername]

I really enjoyed working on this tournament, and hope that many more tournaments of this sort happen in future. I would one day like to have the chance to play a tournament like this, but I would also be very happy to be involved in writing possible future iterations.

For the future, there are two things I think we did well that should be replicated, and one thing we could have done better that future iterations might want to improve on. The first thing that I thought was definitely good was Magin's choice of distribution by genre for each packet, which I think is nigh ideal. The second good thing was that we did not attempt to keep all the answer-lines to one level of difficulty. This would have been very difficult and limiting. Instead, we wrote questions at various difficulty levels, rated the difficulty of each other's questions, and then balanced each packet based on those ratings so that each packet had an equal number of easy, medium, and hard questions. I think this was the best solution. The one thing I do not think we did well was balancing the distribution by time period or nationality. Late Romanticism and Early Modernism are too dominant, as is Russia / Soviet Union. This probably reflects our tastes as listeners.

I've been looking through this lately, and I really like this set. Well done.

The only complaint I have so far is small. In the Faure tossup, the Pavane, Op. 50 showed up much earlier than I expected for it to, since it's a standard piece in the orchestra repertoire. Although, maybe I'm just biased because I played it years ago.

EDIT: Maybe a document of "what to look for in your answer" would be nice? Sometimes I'm guessing composers for a specific work and such.

You're probably right. The last two clues of the Fauré tossup are excerpts from his Requiem. I debated in what order to place the Dolly Suite and the Pavane before the Requiem, and ended up putting the Pavane earlier, as I figured there would be more pianists who had played Dolly than orchestral musicians who had played the Pavane. This was probably ill-advised.

Speaking of ill-advised, my lead-in to the Tchaikovsky tossup is an absolutely terrible hose, as it is an adaptation by Tchaikovsky of a piece by Mozart, which I hadn't realized when I chose it. I apologize to any players that might have screwed over. If I get a chance, I'll replace the first clip with something else.

Also, I was wondering about the possibility of using these kinds of pyramidal audio tossups for regular tournaments. Considering the many pitfalls of music writing for quizbowl (it's easy to choose unhelpful clues when describing a piece of music, since it can be difficult to figure out what aspects of the piece are unique enough to be recognized by players with knowledge), it might be easier for writers to prepare audio tossups instead, since it's much harder to screw those up. These tossups also reward listening to music much more effectively than normal tossups do, and are also a way to prevent a tournament from having a wildly divergent music distribution (it's a lot easier to focus on modern/experimental music in written questions because modern music tends to have a lot of quirks that lend themselves well to written clues).

Admittedly, the volume of these tossups might be a problem, but for a well-organized tournament, it's not hard to procure a few laptop speakers. A small, independent tournament would be the best venue to try incorporating these audio tossups, and I'm curious if these questions can be successfully included in academic tournaments without unduly disrupting the round.

My main concern with doing this (besides the logistical problems of insuring ample amplification that you already noted) is that it would create a stringency for music that does not exist for other categories: it would then be nearly impossible to answer a music tossup if you had never listened to the piece, unless perhaps the moderator read out a sentence at the end to act as the giveaway. In other work-based categories, we do not presume that at least one player on each team has first-hand knowledge of every single work tossed up; but making music questions work this way would be presuming exactly that. Also, if this were to be instituted (perhaps at a few specific quasi-experimental open tournaments, rather than as a general rule), I would hope those tournaments would also run Visual Arts as pyramidal slide shows, as was done in Eyes That Do Not See. I know that Visual Arts suffers a lot less than Music from the problem of unhelpful descriptions, but it seems only logical and fair to apply this idea to Fine Arts as a whole, rather than to just Music.

[Cheynem]

I only played a few packets. They were a lot of fun.

This discussion about writing visual or auditory pyramidal questions is interesting. I answered a few questions when playing this on composers I enjoy listening to, like Strauss the Elder or Vivaldi or Brahms. I almost never answer music questions during regular quizbowl. I don't enjoy remembering musical titles, have no idea how music actually works, don't understand notes or sequences, etc. But I do like listening to classical music and know what (some) pieces sound like when I hear them. So in effect, you're rewarding more of the casual listener than the student of music, I suppose with these kinds of questions. That is not good or bad per se, just interesting.