"Dreamscapes" - Satisfaction Survey

Please fill out the survey to help the staff organize better competitions in the future!  The survey is anonymous so we can't see who chose which responses.

Make participants use their real name?

Since you are asking us to "reply in the thread and voice your opinion!", here's mine:

I did not participate in the competition because I am not really for the ranking of compositions/composers. Each composer/composition is unique and it is only a subjective judgement that would assume to place one above or below the other. Also, the impact of my piece being ranked by far the lowest of all the participants' in the previous competition was too much for me to take. So, I didn't participate in order to protect myself from a potentially similar outcome and impact.

Personally, I'm not much of "competition composer" so my opinions on this don't matter, but I was just thinking about question number 5.

There are a couple of things that come to mind for me.

To take disallowing live recordings further, I would say that there should be a minimum audio/mockup quality threshold that must be met. As I learned back in my OCR days, a disparity in samples or live performances put things on unequal ground, psychologically and often due to novelty. You can have a composer who has a fantastic piece, but can't afford high-end samples or live musicians, so they essentially get punished for being poor even though they were allowed in.

So I think it could be worth it to establish, on a competition to competition basis, a baseline that should not be dramatically exceeded or failed to reach

Second thing, and for me, this is the big one and has held me back from entering before:

I would like to see the sheet music requirement eliminated.

I get that a lot of people here use notation, I understand that the judges would probably argue it provides them with a "closer look" or something to that effect at the composition, and it does add a great visual aspect to Mike's video BUT — it is honestly just not relevant to judging a recorded piece of music, yet it is also included in the scoring for or against pieces. It also means potentially more work for both the composer and the judges having to consider the sheet music, the recording, and the piece itself.

You guys know me, I spent a shameful amount of money on samples over 20 years, I take pride in the mockups, and it's much faster to just compose it all straight in with a MIDI controller. However, there is not a great solution for turning that into detailed, aesthetic sheet music in a timely manner; even going back and Quantizing the MIDI 100%, adjusting things by hand, etc. it was a soul-crushing experience trying to make it presentable in musescore. Much worse if it would've been more than 2 instruments. Working in the reverse way, importing the MIDI from Musescore, creates a lot more work for the mockup.

Which is why, I will admit, the piece I submitted was merely a piano patch sketch of what I was inspired to come up with for this competition; I'm still not finished the real piece's mockup and orchestration.

So, where I'm going with this is: I want to give it 100%, but the time investment (even with the generous deadlines) to create 3+ minute piece required away from other music projects that have a larger audience, sometimes paid gigs or creating new store assets, as well as just life in general, is generally not worth it.

My 2cents anyway. I enjoyed the video and the pieces.