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Guerilla Imaginary Landscape

Posted: Tue Jun 12, 2018 9:40 pm
by hftf
Imaginary Landscape No. 4 is just six weeks away! I hope you’re as excited as I am for John Lawrence to direct another iteration of the best quizbowl event of all.

In preparation for IL4, and just for fun, I will run a guerilla online event on audio questions that you will submit to me. This event has the following goals:
  • Laid-back practice session for IL4
  • Subsidize some prizes to be awarded at IL4
  • Fun event for those who can’t make it to IL4
  • Socialize about music with nice people
  • Try your hand at making audio questions
  • Get exposed to some music that’s new to you
You will have two weeks to “write” a small number of questions. I expect to receive 100 submitted questions from around 20 interested players, so I don’t plan to write many questions myself.

Cost

EDIT 3: The event will actually be free to play. However, there is a recommended donation:

$10  – less than 5 questions submitted
$5    – 5 to 9 questions submitted
Free – 10 or more questions submitted

This is an incentive to get you to write more questions, or contribute to prizes otherwise.

Submission guidelines

There is no enforced distribution. However:
  • Please keep questions to around 60 seconds in length. A question should have around 6 ten-second clues in decreasing order of difficulty, but this may vary.
  • Please write at least 75% of your questions on easy, accessible answerlines. Creativity of clues is better than creativity of answerlines.
  • Please write at least 25% of your questions outside your comfort zone. Opera, jazz, film, rock, world, classical, whatever it may be.
  • Please balance out overly whimsical ideas with some more standard questions.
I’d like this event to be welcoming to all, including those who never played IL before, so please don’t submit questions that nobody would reasonably convert, like Roussel’s Bacchus et Ariane.

If you’re not familiar with how Imaginary Landscape questions work, more information about the past three iterations are linked from this thread. I am rehosting the packets on GitHub.

Submission mechanism

It is usually very laborious to put together audio questions using conventional tools. To make it way easier, I am offering the following proposal: If you submit a spreadsheet as specified below, I will automatically download, splice, and stitch together all the audio clips in order for you.

Sample submission spreadsheet for you to make a copy of. Don’t worry about the yellow columns, which are merely for informational use.
Clips (Sheet 1): Numbered list of all “clues” (clips/snippets)
Meta (Sheet 2): Prompts, answerlines, your name, and other metadata (like difficulty, in case someone wants to skip the hard questions)

Clips are specified as a YouTube video ID, the start time in seconds, and the length in seconds. So if you want to include a clip of your organ playing, it will have to be from a YouTube video.

Registration

To submit, send me an email before Tuesday morning, June 26, containing a link to your spreadsheet. If you submitted early, feel free to continue adding questions until then.
If you want to play but don’t want to submit questions, you can register by emailing me.

I will take a couple of days to curate the submissions, reduce repeats, playtest, give a bit of feedback, generate the audio files, and confirm that they turned out the way you wanted. Since I will be playtesting your questions by myself, I recommend that you hide the columns containing spoilers.

The event will take place on Thursday, June 28, around 6 p.m. EDT. You will be sent a Discord invitation after registering by email.

I plan to upload the set soon after the event in case people want to use it as study material. If you want to mirror this in person for some reason, we can arrange that over email.

Send me an email at [email protected] if you have questions, concerns, suggestions, or technical troubles.

EDIT: If there's a lot of interest, I might split the event into two sessions, since 20 experts in an online shoot-out may be overwhelming. The first session would stay at 6 to accommodate the UK. The second session might be several hours later, or even on another day, to accommodate the West Coast. I could also have “expert”/“casual” sessions if people want that. I’ll update this post with more info later on.

I am tracking people who have expressed interest in this spreadsheet to estimate how long the event will take. You can edit it if you want, but I am only taking registrations by email.

EDIT 2: Sameer’s "Music Mafia Packet" will be read at the end of the first session.

Re: Guerilla Imaginary Landscape

Posted: Wed Jun 13, 2018 1:58 pm
by Fado Alexandrino
A guide was prepared in 2015 when preparing audio clips for the International History Olympiad which may help people who want to contribute to this. Of course, follow the specs in the OP if they differ from this guide.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-bz ... sp=sharing

There's some safeguards audacity has to ripped CD tracks, your best bet is to find a youtube ripper and take it from there.

Re: Guerilla Imaginary Landscape

Posted: Tue Jun 19, 2018 6:25 pm
by hftf
Update

This is a reminder that you have one week to submit or register for Guerilla Imaginary Landscape.

So far, I have accounted for 15–20 people who are planning to write over 160 questions in total. (That’s already as long as a standard set with eight packets of 20!) I want to thank everyone who submitted early – it will really lighten the burden that increases near the deadline. I honestly did not expect such a high turnout, and I’m very happy with the level of interest.

Since one of my goals was for people to try their hand at writing audio questions and also getting feedback from other players in real time, I originally wanted to play each question until the end, but that likely isn’t feasible anymore. If each question takes 90 seconds on average, which is optimistic, then 160 questions comes out to at least 4 hours. This means that on a single day, I can only play through all the questions once.

I may do a second full session that starts later in the day (around 7:30 p.m. EDT) to accommodate more players on the following Thursday, July 5.

Outreach

I highly value offering an opportunity for all interested players to participate at whatever their comfort level. Since not everybody checks the forums, I will soon be reaching out by email to anyone who I think might be interested, including those who played Imaginary Landscape No. 3 or last year’s reading of old packets, those who had an impressive music statline at one of this year’s tournaments, etc. You can also reach out to your friends too.

For that reason, I would like to have a separate, shorter session intended for HS and novice players, which will be limited to an easier batch of questions. It will possibly start on Friday, June 29, at 6 p.m. EDT, but potential players should inform me about scheduling before I settle on that time. This HS/novice-oriented event will be free (but submissions are still encouraged).

Feedback

I just finished playtesting the excellent submission from Daniel Guo, which set a very high bar. For some reason Daniel really wanted feedback, so I wrote him 2,018 words of praise, which I hope to share after the event. I basically said that he nailed what the guidelines were going for: integrating creative clue selection with straightforward answerline selection.

Although I’d like to keep giving helpful feedback for every single submission, I might not be able to go to the same lengths as I did for Daniel. So get yours in sooner if you’d like a better chance at that. The volume of submissions also probably means that I will do fewer of the organizational things I originally planned, like curating submissions and reducing repeats.

Clarification

Joe Su shared a very helpful guide for people who want to write audio questions using Audacity. But I’d like to emphasize that you should read the “Submission mechanism” section of the original post so that you don’t get the wrong idea and do unnecessary manual work. I am making the submission process much easier by just having you specify the clues you want in a spreadsheet, and I will do all the audio stitching myself.

Re: Guerilla Imaginary Landscape

Posted: Thu Jun 28, 2018 10:50 am
by hftf
I just sent an email to everyone who registered. If you think you registered but did not receive my email, or otherwise still want to play, please contact me ASAP.

Re: Guerilla Imaginary Landscape

Posted: Wed Jul 04, 2018 9:00 pm
by hftf
Schedule for remaining sessions and other events

I sent an email to everyone who registered on Wednesday, July 4 with information about the Discord server.

Thursday, July 5 (tomorrow)

6:30 p.m. EDT – John’s seeding packet for Imaginary Landscape No. 4
  • for players who registered for Imaginary Landscape No. 4 in Chicago (I encourage you to sign up if you haven’t done so already!)
  • 20 minutes
  • in the main quizbowl Discord server
7:00 p.m. EDT – Sameer’s “Music Mafia Packet”
  • for all players
  • 20 minutes
  • in the main quizbowl Discord server
7:30 p.m. EDT – Guerilla Imaginary Landscape
  • for all players who missed (or partially missed) the June 28 session
  • smaller audience; starts later to accommodate the West Coast
  • 4 hours
  • in a private Discord server (invitations sent by email)
  • same batch of packets that were heard on June 28:
    Beverly Fu, Bryan Lu, Chris Manners, Chris Sims, Daniel Guo, David Dennis, Erik Christensen, Jeremy Tsai,
    Jonathan Magin, Kevin Wang, Mia Nussbaum, Michael Zhuang, Oliver Clarke, Sameer Apte, Will Alston, Will Bordowitz
Monday, July 9

7:30 p.m. EDT – Guerilla Imaginary Landscape
  • for all players
  • 2 hours (might be repeated on Friday at 7:30 p.m. for a smaller audience)
  • in a private Discord server (invitations sent by email)
  • rest of the packets that were not heard on June 28 or July 5:
    Eric Liu, Jasper Lee, Muling He, Natan Holtzman, Saul Hankin, and some mystery packets
Wednesday, July 11

7:30 p.m. EDT – Guerilla Imaginary Landscape
  • for HS/novice players, curious spectators, etc.
  • 2 hours
  • in a private Discord server (invitations sent by email or publicly posted here)
  • only easy or medium questions, taken from all submitted packets
I invite anyone who would like to participate (or spectate) to come to this session. It will be a great learning opportunity, serving as a crash course on a wide range of music history. Don’t worry if you can’t tell the difference between Bach and Beethoven or if Stravinsky and Shostakovich sound the same to you. The questions cover all kinds of music, so you’re bound to know something – especially if you played an instrument when you were younger, or if you’re more familiar with jazz or film or popular music. You can absorb a lot from just listening and being eager to learn. I plan to play out each question in full so that you can hear every clue. You’ll be in an audience of people with a similar level of experience, so there’s no shame – just come and have fun!

Report from June 28

Scoreboard

Code: Select all

 #    Player              Pts   10s  –5s

 1    Michael Yue         250    28    6
 2    John Lawrence       185    21    5
 3    Sameer Apte         135    18    9
 4    Will Holub-Moorman  105    11    1
 4    Mia Nussbaum        105    12    3
 6    Jonathan Magin      100    11    2
 7    Michael Zhuang       85    11    5
 8    Chris Sims           80    10    4
 9    Dylan Minarik        70    10    6
 9    Daniel Guo           70     9    4
11    Will Bordowitz       65     8    3
12    Kevin Wang           50     5     
13    Oliver Clarke        40     4     
14    David Dennis         30     4    2
15    Tracy Mirkin          5     1    1
15    Taylor Harvey         5     1    1
15    Erik Christensen      5     3    5
18    Muling He            –5          1
18    Bryan Lu             –5          1
20    William Golden      –10          2
21    Will Alston         –15     1    5
21    Jeremy Tsai         –15     1    5
Thank you to everyone who participated!

Many participants said that they loved getting to write some questions. So if you’d still like to give it a try, I will accept submissions until Saturday.

Thank you to Daniel Guo, John Lawrence, Michael Yue, Michael Zhang for your kind donations!

Report from July 5

Scoreboard

Code: Select all

 #    Player              Pts   10s  –5s

 1    Natan Holtzman      420    49   14
 2    Michael Li          245    30   11
 3    Jasper Lee          220    23    2
 4    Joe Su              170    20    6
 5    Beverly Fu           75     8    1
 6    Klaus Llwynog        70     9    4
 6    Chris Manners        70     9    4
 8    Julian Fuchs         40     5    2
 9    Tejas Raje           30     3     
10    Steven Silverman      5     1    1
Thank you again to all the players and writers! There were so many excellent buzzes and excellent questions.

Thank you Jasper Lee, Michael Li, and Tejas Raje for your generosity!

Re: Guerilla Imaginary Landscape

Posted: Fri Jul 13, 2018 3:30 pm
by hftf
The final session will start tonight at 7:30 p.m. EDT and last for 2 hours. I will read the second batch of questions (the same packets as July 9: Eric Liu, Jasper Lee, Muling He, Natan Holtzman, Saul Hankin, and some mystery packets) for a smaller audience. Everyone who missed the July 9 session is welcome! Please join this Discord server and read the information in #welcome.

Afterward, I will upload the set to the audio packets GitHub repository. You may use it for practice either by yourself or in a group, for free mirrors, or for anything else.

Report from July 9

Scoreboard

Code: Select all

 #    Player              Pts   10s  –5s

 1    Michael Yue         150    17    4
 2    Sameer Apte         105    12    3
 3    Will Holub-Moorman   80     8     
 3    John Lawrence        80     9    2
 5    Mia Nussbaum         50     5     
 6    Michael Li           45     6    3
 7    James Maverick       25     4    3
 8    Daniel Guo           20     3    2
 9    Jeremy Tsai          10     1     
 9    Eric Liu             10     1     
 9    Beverly Fu           10     1     
12    Natan Holtzman        5     2    3
12    Jonathan Magin        5     1    1
14    David Dennis         –5          1
15    Joe Su              –10          2
15    Alex Damisch        –10     1    4
Congratulations to Michael Yue for taking first place in a field of masterly players! I’m proud of the great buzzes I saw from everyone, especially on the mysteriously hard questions.

Report from July 11

Scoreboard

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 #    Player              Pts   10s  –5s

 1    John John Groger    180    18     
 2    Karan Gurazada      120    16    8
 3    Ian Rackow           70     8    2
 4    Muling He            55    10    9
 5    Beverly Fu           40     4     
 5    Ben Xu               40     4     
 7    Noah Chen            20     4    4
 8    Aakash Patel         15     2    1
 9    Jacob Augelli        10     1     
 9    Chris Shan           10     1     
11    Matthew Siff          0     1    2
12    Keaton Martin       –15          3
Thanks to all the players for coming, and to all the spectators who shared their music expertise. Sorry for the bizarre technical difficulties! I hope you had fun and learned something new!

Report from July 13

Scoreboard

Code: Select all

 #    Player              Pts   10s  –5s

 1    Kevin Wang          240    27    6
 2    Will Bordowitz      135    16    5
 3    Eric Douglass        85     9    1
 4    Saul Hankin          35     6    5
 5    Matt Lafer            5     1    1
Thank you for coming to the final session, and to Eric for the generous tip!

Guerilla Imaginary Landscape

Posted: Thu May 02, 2019 12:00 am
by hftf
This week, several people told me that they would be interested in a second iteration of GIL, so I’m considering a GIL2 on short notice.

If it happens, I would most likely run at least one session between May 20–22 (and maybe more in early June), which is just before IL5 at HSNCT, serving as a good way to practice for it, but still far enough away to give about 2 weeks to prepare your submissions.

Since I’ve already received 1 submission of 27 questions, we only need a handful of participants and a few more submissions to make it happen! Email [email protected] soon to express interest. Estimate your available dates and how many questions you’d be able to write by May 17 or so. (I can’t accept late submissions because I need a few days to edit them, but I will accept partial on-time submissions that you can add a few more late questions to.)

The submission guidelines and mechanism would be identical to last year. (If you submitted last year, please use a new spreadsheet.) One new request: if you want to use a single clip from a long work, please take it from a shorter video if possible, because it will save me a lot of download time and space. (For example, prefer this very short video over this very long one.)

Re: Guerilla Imaginary Landscape

Posted: Thu May 02, 2019 9:47 am
by ThisIsMyUsername
I am delighted by the announcement of another edition of this. But this time, could we maybe set some basic distributional requirements? (Even just very broad ones about genre or time period.) This is a quite normal thing for guerrilla tournaments to do, and might iron out some of the more extreme imbalances that happened last time.

Re: Guerilla Imaginary Landscape

Posted: Thu May 02, 2019 11:00 am
by hftf
ThisIsMyUsername wrote: Thu May 02, 2019 9:47 am I am delighted by the announcement of another edition of this. But this time, could we maybe set some basic distributional requirements? (Even just very broad ones about genre or time period.) This is a quite normal thing for guerrilla tournaments to do, and might iron out some of the more extreme imbalances that happened last time.
If you (the community) can quickly propose a distribution that submissions would “aim for” rather than a strictly enforced requirement, and that would be easy for submitters to keep track of, and easy for the editor to remedy imbalance by adding a few more questions to the editor’s packet, then sure, I’ll endorse it.

Of course, feel free to submit more questions on neglected music you like (unlike other submission tournaments, doing so doesn’t prevent them from existing in other packets).

Re: Guerilla Imaginary Landscape

Posted: Thu May 02, 2019 11:46 am
by ThisIsMyUsername
hftf wrote: Thu May 02, 2019 11:00 am If you (the community) can quickly propose a distribution that submissions would “aim for” rather than a strictly enforced requirement, and that would be easy for submitters to keep track of, and easy for the editor to remedy imbalance by adding a few more questions to the editor’s packet, then sure, I’ll endorse it.
If we were to emulate a really barebones version of previous non-Guerrilla distributions, and allow for plenty of wiggle room, my suggestion would be: per 10 submitted questions, aim for at least one pre-1750, three 1750-1910, one 1910-present, and one non-classical; and try to represent orchestral, keyboard/chamber, opera, and choral/dance each at least once, and not crazily overemphasize one of these. Just an opening suggestion, though.

Re: Guerilla Imaginary Landscape

Posted: Thu May 02, 2019 2:37 pm
by #1 Mercury Adept
hftf wrote: Tue Jun 19, 2018 6:25 pmI just finished playtesting the excellent submission from Daniel Guo, which set a very high bar. For some reason Daniel really wanted feedback, so I wrote him 2,018 words of praise, which I hope to share after the event.
Oh yeah, did this ever happen? :smile:

Re: Guerilla Imaginary Landscape

Posted: Thu May 02, 2019 3:00 pm
by hftf
Louis XIV and Twenty Million Henchmen wrote: Thu May 02, 2019 2:37 pm
hftf wrote: Tue Jun 19, 2018 6:25 pmI just finished playtesting the excellent submission from Daniel Guo, which set a very high bar. For some reason Daniel really wanted feedback, so I wrote him 2,018 words of praise, which I hope to share after the event.
Oh yeah, did this ever happen? :smile:
You can read my feedback to Daniel and follow along with his original submission. The final questions and clues may have changed and shifted somewhat. Apologies that I ran out of time to write more feedback last year; I’ll try to do more this year.

Re: Guerilla Imaginary Landscape

Posted: Thu May 02, 2019 5:57 pm
by #1 Mercury Adept
Awesome! Yeah, I was curious to see what discussion of questions in this format looked like. :grin:

Re: Guerilla Imaginary Landscape

Posted: Tue May 07, 2019 11:45 am
by SparkleOyster
If my previous 27 questions are of somewhat okay quality... I think I'll try to increase my submission to 35-40.

Meanwhile, I'll be in China / Japan whenever this is hosted. And I'll try to make it there!

Re: Guerilla Imaginary Landscape

Posted: Wed May 08, 2019 12:43 am
by SparkleOyster
I've finalized my submission to 35 questions, adjusted the difficulty ratings, and cut a few overly long questions short...
Thank you for putting this together Ophir!

Re: Guerilla Imaginary Landscape

Posted: Fri May 17, 2019 8:00 pm
by hftf
The main session of GIL2 will happen at 7:30 EDT on Wednesday, May 22, and will last about 3 hours. There will be at least another session after HSNCT, probably in the middle of the first week of June, but I will announce it later.

Tomorrow I will send an email containing a Discord invitation link to everyone who registered by email (view the list of participants). We will use the same server as last year.

Thanks to the 11 submitters so far, we have about 150 questions to play on. Feedback on submissions will be sent by email soon.

Today is the last day to submit before the May 22 session. You can add on to your submission before May 20.
If you can’t finish a packet now but still want to submit a packet before the later June session, email me to work it out.

Re: Guerilla Imaginary Landscape

Posted: Wed May 22, 2019 6:00 pm
by hftf
This is happening tonight at 7:30 p.m. EDT and continuing tomorrow night. Email me if you want to participate but haven't registered.

The order of packets will be:

Code: Select all

Wednesday        Thursday
111 questions    77 questions

Beverly Fu       Ethan Strombeck
Chris Sims       John Lawrence
Jasper Lee       Mia Nussbaum
Jeremy Tsai      Natan Holtzman
Jonathan Magin   Saul Hankin
Michael Li       Sky Li
Muling He        William Bordowitz

Re: Guerilla Imaginary Landscape

Posted: Fri May 24, 2019 7:52 am
by Antrobus63
Thanks very much, Ophir. I've really loved the two IL's I've played. It's a blast to listen, I get some new pieces to listen to... what's not to like? Keep 'em coming.

Re: Guerilla Imaginary Landscape

Posted: Tue Jun 04, 2019 1:00 am
by hftf
Contrary to what I suggested, I will not be running the second sessions of GIL2 this week. Since there’s no mirror of IL5 at NSC, there’s no rush to do it now. I’ll aim for early in the week of June 17 instead.

Several packets have been submitted (or added to) since the first session, so on a later date there will be a “finals” session consisting of all brand new questions (some of harder difficulty).

Re: Guerilla Imaginary Landscape

Posted: Wed Jul 10, 2019 1:00 am
by hftf
For anyone who missed it in May, I’d like to run the second session of the first two batches of packets next Monday, July 15, and Tuesday, July 16, at 7:30 p.m. EDT. Email me if you haven’t registered yet. The session(s) for the third batch of packets will be postponed until at least August once the last few submissions are in.