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
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.
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.