Inspire: Hmmmm. A bit Pacific-Northwest "grundge"-ish, with the somewhat
nihilist mood typical of that genre (I really like "Smells Like
Team Spirit" - Nirvana).
This one gets a 7 from the Russian judge.
Can I make an observation? The score seems a bit repetitive. Did you use
a sequencer for this (like the ones that make .mod and .s3m files)? These
tools are generally useful, but because of their cut-and-paste nature,
they make it very easy to overuse short-term structure to build the long-
term structure of the song. You /did/ have an instrumental-only portion
that served to provide some overall structure, but the beat, key and
amplitude in it didn't depart much from the rest of the song, so the
effect was minimal. If you analyze enormously popular compositions
from Mozart to ABBA to Nirvana, you can see a pattern where the short-
term spatio-temporal structure bears a simple mathematical relationship
to the long-term spatio-temporal structure (that is, the tempo and amplitude
of the smaller blocks relate or "mesh" well with the larger). But to
achieve this, you first have to make them different enough to make them
distinct. Take the Nirvana song mentioned above, for example. There's
an overall theme where the music is low key, the tempo is relaxed, and
the singing is slurred and at the edge of being off key. But there is
another part that is blaring and starts abruptly, the tempo is more
insistent, and the singing "wakes up" into a yell. The long term structure
of this song is built by interspersing a few of these louder, shorter
parts with the former in a simple, recognizeable pattern. A slightly
different, but not dissonant, beginning and end, complete the overall
structure. It's kind of like a story, with an introduction, story line
and conclusion. If you make a sonogram of these hit songs, the
Cartesian characteristics are fairly easy to spot, and if you see enough
of them, you begin to see the overall mathematical structuring they
all exhibit. Mozart is the same way, but the short-term and long term
spatio-temporal structure is a little more complex. Where Nirvana would
have periodic instances of basically the same loud part, Mozart would
make the second occurrence of it different from the first, but the
pattern would itself bear a readily apparent mathematical /relationship/
to the first, creating a nested, or sometimes cross-referenced building-
up structure for the first half of the composition, then reverse the
process for the second half of the composition, etc. The common thread
is that these various artists enrich their compositions with short-term
and long-term structure (i.e not too simple) while keeping the structure
readily apparent (i.e. without making it too complex). The mathematical
aptitude of any individual will correlate well with the complexity of
structure in his or her favorite compositions. What you want to shoot
for is the peak of the bell-shaped curve of mathematical aptitude in
the general population. ABBA did this well. Nirvana was a little to the
left, and Mozart was a little to the right. I hope I'm not trying to tell
you something you already know.....
Dan