私の日本語能力が低すぎて、このあとがきを翻訳することができないので、英語のみで書かせていただきます。
ご迷惑をおかけしますが、このあとがきにご興味のある方は機械翻訳をご利用ください。
First and foremost, I would like to congratulate
paraneumann and
Hyparpax (a.k.a. Be-Music Sampler)
for winning best score and most novel respectively. Their works were quite impressive.
I also decided to release the results of the players too,
which reveals that
L216 is the best impressor of the event, as he labelled every single entry as NOVEL. To everyone else who wrote impressions,
thank you for your hard work! The vast majority of you wrote an impression for every single entry.
My motivation for organizing this event was a desire to see more experimental works that tried to push the boundaries of BMS.
In many other events, I see a lot of great works that are not necessarily high quality compared to top-ranking entries, but still stand out in a way that deserves to be praised.
Some of the entries are too avant-garde to be appreciated by the masses. This was my counter-movement to the typical popularity contest.
However, I still had to recognise that a high quality work is still impressive, so I didn’t want to base the event solely around avant-garde works.
This is why I ended up choosing the theme of “standing out”.
I was really unsure if I wanted to include the list of examples for what could be considered a novel work, but I ended up including it after all.
The main motivation behind including it was to give people ideas and kickstart some creative processes. Without any prompts,
it might be hard to get a good idea of what counts as novel, and thus many people might end up not joining at all due to insecurity.
I also didn’t want to exclude anyone from participating with a more conventional work. After all, it wasn’t my job to judge wether or not
a given work was novel or not. I wanted to leave that up to the players’ judgement,
as it is very interesting to see what different people’s the threshold for a “novel work is.
When it came to the scoring method for the event, I went through a bunch of different iterations.
I wanted to base myself on an impression system that most people would be familiar, so a normal point range for scoring simply the quality of the work
was implemented. But on top of this, I wanted to reward people well for making works that were considered very novel. So the NOVEL label was added.
Then, I tried making some calculations using hypothetical situations. This is how I landed on a potential 30 point bonus for getting a high novelty rate.
30 was a bit of an arbitrary number honestly, and it's the one thing I wish I had a better solution for in this event.
However, it seems that the bonus points ended up mattering after all, although maybe not as much as I had originally hoped for.
If I were to host a similar event in the future, I think I would use a more rational method of finding the maximum amount of bonus points one can achieve.
Originally, I was planning to participate with my own entry. My idea of a novel entry was to create a song that was made exclusively using code. That is, no DAW at all.
All the instruments would be coded by myself using Csound, and the score would be written into the code as well.
That way I could make a completely self-contained code that one could download and run on their own computer and get the whole song.
Unfortunately, between exams and other projects, I simply didn’t have the time to finish this idea. I am actually not sure if people would’ve found this idea novel at all either.
I’m really sad I didn’t make it in time, but maybe I will save the idea for later.
I hope that this event has inspired people to experiment more with the possibilities of BMS, both in what is possible to do with the format itself, and with the music.
I’d love to see more works like the ones submitted to this event show up in other events.
Perhaps, if there is enough demand, I may consider organizing another event like this one in the future.
Once again, I would like to thank
q/stol for letting me use the BMS Search event venue,
scytheleg for letting me use his pre-registration venue, and
空読無 白眼 for helping me translate the rules and information about the event.
— Dolphin
