A non-musician friend of mine suggested this to me and it seems like a really cool idea, so here we go!
What's this experiment about?
Musical Telephone is an experiment on how different musicians will respond to the same inspiration source and just how far off we can get. It involves two completely separate groups of musicians creating musical responses to those of the other people in their respective groups, starting from one short song. I can't think of a better way to elaborate on this than using an example.
So here's your example.
- We have two groups of musicians. Group 1 consists of A, B, C, D, and E. Group 2 consists of V, W, X, Y, and Z.
- We have a short song by me (or anyone else who wants to volunteer) that may tell some story or have some kind of theme, but no one knows what it is.
- "A" and "V" listen to the song and write songs of their own in response. They could take anything from the song and run with it: a chord progression, a certain style, a theme or story that they picked up from it. No one else listens to this song.
- Next, "B" listens to "A"'s song and makes a song inspired by it. "W" does the same with "V"'s song. Keeping in mind that neither of them listened to the original source and are going solely off responses to it.
- This continues down the line until we get to E and Z making responses to D and Y, respectively. No one has listened to any song besides the one they respond to.
- Afterwards, all responses are released to the public and we can listen and hear how far we go from the original source and exactly how we got there.
Rules
- The number one rule is to ONLY listen to the song you are using as inspiration. It kind of defeats the purpose if the last person on the list has heard the original song or any of the responses besides the one he is responding to.
- Telephone always has that guy who purposely dicks up the message to make something really weird at the end. Don't be that guy. No troll songs. Do your best to make a serious response.
- I don't care what method you use to submit the songs to me or what format you use as long as it's of decent quality. I'm not an audiophile, but the next guy in your group might be.
Now here's how I'm planning on organizing this (keeping in mind I've never organized an event like this - I'm open to tips and suggestions!). I'll start by collecting a list of volunteers from this thread, preferably at least 10 so we can have 5 per group. I'll write a simple program to randomly sort these volunteers into two groups in a random order. I'll send the inspiration song to the first person on each list. They will send their responses to me and I will forward the responses to the next two people on the list. I assume we'll be doing this through Skype or via forum PMs and upload sites like Dropbox, Soundcloud, Mediafire, whatever.
Again, I'm always open to suggestions and I'll answer any questions you have to the best of my ability. The main purpose of this thread is to gather volunteers but if you have cool ideas and want to brainstorm, be my guest.
If you're interested, leave a post here. You can also add me on Skype (blindbaker49) if you have questions or plan on submitting responses through Skype.
Participants
- Nine Volt
- LFP
- eery
- DXsmiley
- Conchetupony
- ExoBassTix
- FLAOFEI
- PYR3LIGHT
- meletric
- Mr.Afrox
- ajbiz11
- Motivfs
- TranquilHooves
- Wisp
- MilesTiden
- CDPP
EDIT: We're full! Sorry if you wanted to participate, but this is already going to take quite a while with what we have.
RESULTS
Tracks are listed in the order in which they went through the groups.
Original Track
Magnitude Zero
Group 1
Group 2
To everyone who participated: thank you SO SO much for lending your talent and patience to this experiment! This took way longer than it should have, so I really appreciate you all sticking it out and remaining patient while I struggled to keep up!
OMG POLKA PLOT!!!
