Fantasy III contest

[Stefan Westerfeld]

   Hi!

The Fantasy Project is an annual challenge. Each artist who participates can
create his own song, as long as he uses the lyrics given below ("Jean Lucs
Poem") unchanged. All styles of music, such as classical, blues, rock,
metal, rap, dance, techno, house, ... are welcome.
 
The results of last year's challenge can be found here:

  http://space.twc.de/~stefan/fantasyII
 
The following rules apply:

* The artist agrees that his song is published under a Creative Commons 3.0,
  Non Commercial, Attribution, Non Modify license. We need this to publish the
  results online.
* The artist needs to send an email with the subject containing the string
  "Fantasy III" to STONI [1] at least 7 days before the deadline, to indicate
  that he wants to participate.
* The artist needs to send an email with links to a web page containing
  uncompressed version of the song before the deadline.
* The deadline is the 31.3.2008, 11:59 pm, German time.
  It is not allowed to sample from or copy melodies or other ideas from other
  material, unless it is obvious that the license permits so.
* Multiple artists (or bands) can submit a song together.
* If you use a program such as BEAST for creating the song, which can store
  the whole song as a .bse file, you can submit this as well - make sure to
  fill out the license and author file.

We'll try to rate and publish the songs as soon as we can after the
deadline is over. However, since we have not run this contest publically
before, we have no good estimate how many submissions we'll get.

Jean Lucs Poem
==============
Wer weiß, wohin des Schicksals Odem uns verweht.
Das weiß der weise Wind.
Keinen Ausweg ich find?.
Macht, Ruhm, Reichtum, Feinde, Freunde - alles vergeht.
Philosophen, Katastrophen - Neues entsteht.
Ich vertrau' dir nicht blind.
 
Sie hatten nicht nur von Luft und Liebe gelebt.
Unendliche Weiten.
Bis zur Antwort gleiten.
Nach Macht und Reichtum nur ist alle Welt bestrebt,
so wie ein Spieler bei einem Gewinn erbebt.
Zeitsprung vorbereiten.
 
Warum sitze ich hier und denk darüber nach?
Fehlschlag ist auch ein Sieg.
Die Folge nach dem Krieg.
Ich werd ihn nie verstehen, mir bleibt nur die Schmach.
Leidenschaft, Mitgefühl und Liebe liegen brach.
Durch Freiheit ewig flieg!


[1] STONI: STONI <Andreas_Steinhardt@...>
[2] This text: http://space.twc.de/~stefan/fantasyIII/

  Cu... Stefan
--
Stefan Westerfeld, Hamburg/Germany, http://space.twc.de/~stefan
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[Hanno-2]

Hi Stefan!

Das sieht gut aus. Der Text ist etwas schwierig vom Timing her. Das hat kein
Musiker geschrieben, sondern jemand, der von Rhythmus nicht so viel Ahnung
hat. Mal sehen, ob ich einen Weg da reinfinde.

Hast du übrigens das hier schon gesehen?

http://www.computerbase.de/news/software/multimedia/2008/maerz/software_noten_musikaufnahme/

„World? What wolrd? The world is just another tracker.“

Gruß Hanno
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[Stefan Westerfeld]

   Hi!

On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 11:19:29AM +0100, Hanno Behrens wrote:
> Das sieht gut aus. Der Text ist etwas schwierig vom Timing her. Das hat kein
> Musiker geschrieben, sondern jemand, der von Rhythmus nicht so viel Ahnung
> hat. Mal sehen, ob ich einen Weg da reinfinde.

Well in fact the text was written by a group of seven musicians. We choose a
topic randomly from a set of topics, and we also choose the length of the
verses from the set [5,12] randomly. Thus we had

Topic: the purpose of life
Scheme:

A12 Wer weiß, wohin des Schicksals Odem uns verweht.
B6  Das weiß der weise Wind.
B6  Keinen Ausweg ich find?.
A12 Macht, Ruhm, Reichtum, Feinde, Freunde - alles vergeht.
B6  Philosophen, Katastrophen - Neues entsteht.
B6  Ich vertrau' dir nicht blind.

Each musician would only view the i18n("Reimwoerter") rhyme words of the
previous artist.

So musician 1 would write:

... verweht.

Musician 2 would write:

... verweht.
... Wind.

Now musician 3 would need to find a B6 line (6 syllables), which fits to
"Wind", so for instance

Klein wie ein klei - nes Kind.

would be a proper third line. A useful scheme for finding rhymes which I
used consists of first writing a mind map of the topic. Then, you can do
a spread-sheet like table:

--------------------------------------
| ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | Wind |
--------------------------------------
| Kei - nen | Aus - weg | ich | find |
--------------------------------------

But I know that its now the most easy text; we choose it by voting after
having created a few texts (some on "Sinn des Lebens" and some on "Faust").

I think this text was choosen because although its not so easy to handle
from a song writers perspective, it has a great sense of consistency and
progression throughout the song, although it was written semi-blind by
different artists, which is nice.

   Cu... Stefan
--
Stefan Westerfeld, Hamburg/Germany, http://space.twc.de/~stefan
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[Hanno-2]

Am Donnerstag, 13. März 2008 schrieb Stefan Westerfeld:

>    Hi!
>
> On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 11:19:29AM +0100, Hanno Behrens wrote:
> > Das sieht gut aus. Der Text ist etwas schwierig vom Timing her. Das hat
> > kein Musiker geschrieben, sondern jemand, der von Rhythmus nicht so viel
> > Ahnung hat. Mal sehen, ob ich einen Weg da reinfinde.
>
> Well in fact the text was written by a group of seven musicians. We choose
> a topic randomly from a set of topics, and we also choose the length of the
> verses from the set [5,12] randomly. Thus we had

Oh, yes. I did not mean to bash the writers of the lines. There will be
problems with this poem. I'll explain it below.

> Topic: the purpose of life
> Scheme:
>
> A12 Wer weiß, wohin des Schicksals Odem uns verweht.
> B6  Das weiß der weise Wind.
> B6  Keinen Ausweg ich find?.
> A12 Macht, Ruhm, Reichtum, Feinde, Freunde - alles vergeht.
> B6  Philosophen, Katastrophen - Neues entsteht.
> B6  Ich vertrau' dir nicht blind.

All right.

The problem that I see, and why I -with a lack of diplomatics- said it will be
difficult is, that on first sight you can see, that there is a clear sentence
melody in "Wer weiß..." but on the other A12 there is just a hammering of
subjects like "Macht, Ruhm,..." While the syllabies are the same the melody
of the sentence is unmatchable. That was just the first thought in mind when
I saw the lines.

First solution would be to smear the whole thing down to a soft "esoteric"
sound without explicit rhythm. But I think, thats a bad way. This two lines
are unmatchable. There cant be the same melody on them. Only the end of the
A12 lines are matching. Its even worse. The words "Macht, Ruhm, Reichtum,..."
are all very strong words which have to pronounced with high intensity, if
you don't want to smear them and lose their meaning. On the other hand the
first A12 is poetical. It has to be soft and emotional for to be believable.

I think my first reaction to the lines are now better understandable. I just
saw this and typed out the response without thinking. It was the very first
impression. By the way - I still think this impression was right.

Which does not mean, that we cant make something of this. Its possible I
think, but it will be difficult. For a good song, I mean, one of the greatest
problems will be the solution for this two lines to match without smearing
them down to goo.

To solve this poetic puzzle you really have to be creative.

with best regards
Hanno
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[Stefan Westerfeld]

   Hi!

On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 01:00:49PM +0100, Hanno Behrens wrote:
> Am Donnerstag, 13. März 2008 schrieb Stefan Westerfeld:
 > > Topic: the purpose of life

> > Scheme:
> >
> > A12 Wer weiß, wohin des Schicksals Odem uns verweht.
> > B6  Das weiß der weise Wind.
> > B6  Keinen Ausweg ich find?.
> > A12 Macht, Ruhm, Reichtum, Feinde, Freunde - alles vergeht.
> > B6  Philosophen, Katastrophen - Neues entsteht.
> > B6  Ich vertrau' dir nicht blind.
>
> All right.
>
> The problem that I see, and why I -with a lack of diplomatics- said it will be
> difficult is, that on first sight you can see, that there is a clear sentence
> melody in "Wer weiß..." but on the other A12 there is just a hammering of
> subjects like "Macht, Ruhm,..." While the syllabies are the same the melody
> of the sentence is unmatchable. That was just the first thought in mind when
> I saw the lines.

Yes, you have got a point here. However, I spoke with STONI about the issue,
and he just said: "Well, the point of the challenge is to provide an
opportunity to artists to get not-so-easy lyrics into a nice song. So if
there are some rough edges in the lyrics (like the one you encountered), its
ok. It will allow artists to show their creativity; and if someone cannot
produce a nice result, then it just shows that (s)he lacks the necessary
experience to participate."

   Cu... Stefan
--
Stefan Westerfeld, Hamburg/Germany, http://space.twc.de/~stefan
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