2025 Halloween Satisfaction Survey

Please fill out the survey to help us organize better competitions in the future!  The survey is anonymous so we won't be able to see who voted for what.  The poll closes on Monday, November 10th, 2025 at 11:59 pm PST.  Thanks for voicing your opinion!

This is really one of the competitions I enjoy the most on YC! Hope more ppl can take this survey so we know how to improve on our next competitions!

Henry

I took it.

1 minute ago, therealAJGS said:

I took it.

I don't how this is still happening but your vote isn't showing up on my end again... 😕

1 minute ago, PeterthePapercomPoser said:

I don't how this is still happening but your vote isn't showing up on my end again... 😕

Happy Halloween... 👻👻👻👻👻

sorry, forgot to press submit!

43 minutes ago, therealAJGS said:

sorry, forgot to press submit!

LoLoL!!

First of all, I have to say that I really enjoyed this competition! It was an intense two weeks—on the one hand, to finish my own composition/arrangement, and on the other hand, to listen to such a diverse range of great musical works. I think all the participants invested a lot of time, effort, and passion to achieve such a result!

I must admit that – puh – reviewing seems to be harder than composing!

We have seen a lot of

• atonality and non-traditional musical structure (to mention some, but not to be exhaustive "Dima’s National Dance" by @Dima, "From Above, Now Below" by @Thatguy v2.0, "Diptych for Piano Quartet" by @Cosmia, "Aos Si" by @HoYin Cheung, "American Cryptids" by @Micah, "Fumage" by @Justin Gruber) and – on the other hand –
• more „beautiful“ and „well-behaved“ pieces (for example, "Ghost Town Requiem" by @UncleRed99, "Bagatelle No. 6" by @Omicronrg9 and "Dance from the skeleton ball" by @MK_Piano), which I very enjoyed, too.
• As „balanced“ between this two poles I would consider "Daunting Steps" by @ferrum.wav and – lol - my own piece.

Therefore, the decision was very hard and due to the subject of the competition, Halloween, the more outlandish pieces were in the better position. The dedications of the badges „spookiest/scariest piece“, „strangest/weirdest/most outlandish piece“ and „biggest thriller“ were – in my opinion – not so easy to distinguish, so that we have one glorious winner in nearly all categories, "From Above, Now Below" by @Thatguy v2.0, my best congratulations.

Special thanks to @PeterthePapercomPoser for organizing that funny contest!

What did you think of the official competition reviewing template?

For me, the competition reviewing template was very useful, giving the focus what to review a clear structure. Even if I did not give a textual review according to the eight categories but only a general one, scoring according to the definitions (i.e. between 0 and 10 points) and calculating an average was useful and helped to determine the winner(s) for the different badges.

I could also imagine that in future competitions, the template and the numbers will be used in an official sheet to determine the overall winner. In such a case, however, it would be necessary to formulate more precisely how we should award the points in order to achieve a fair result that can be used for such a calculation. I noticed that some of the reviewers often awarded 10 points to pieces/categories they liked, while I was a bit stingy with this top score (apologies to all participants). I would like to say that such differences in the use of scores between different reviewers, although consistent in their own assessment, could lead to a kind of injustice.

What would you like to see in future competitions?

I think, the most revenue of the competition is getting a lot of review in a short period of time. Therefore, I would like to keep the competition „just for fun“ without monetary awards.

An interesting variant could be to keep the competitors and judges anonymous. Such a rule could be combined with the mandatory use of the template and its usage for the calculation of the winner, as mentioned above. In such a case it would be necessary to require that all participants review all the other entries to achieve comparability and fairness. However, such a strict set of rules could imply that some members would hesitate to participate, thus we could try out that for one competition, but should not apply it to all future ones.

12 minutes ago, Wieland Handke said:

Special thanks to @PeterthePapercomPoser for organizing that funny contest!

You're welcome!  I enjoyed it!

14 minutes ago, Wieland Handke said:

I could also imagine that in future competitions, the template and the numbers will be used in an official sheet to determine the overall winner. In such a case, however, it would be necessary to formulate more precisely how we should award the points in order to achieve a fair result that can be used for such a calculation. I noticed that some of the reviewers often awarded 10 points to pieces/categories they liked, while I was a bit stingy with this top score (apologies to all participants). I would like to say that such differences in the use of scores between different reviewers, although consistent in their own assessment, could lead to a kind of injustice.

First, thank you for voicing your opinion!  When we've done competitions with monetary awards and official judges in the past this was an issue that people have brought up.  However, ultimately, when the different scores from the different judges were averaged together, as long as the judges tried to accurately reflect the differences between the various musical entries in their scores then once the scores were all averaged together, even if say, some of the judges scored the pieces in a different range of the scale than others, the scoring still worked to accurately reflect the differences in quality between the different entries.

19 minutes ago, Wieland Handke said:

An interesting variant could be to keep the competitors and judges anonymous. Such a rule could be combined with the mandatory use of the template and its usage for the calculation of the winner, as mentioned above. In such a case it would be necessary to require that all participants review all the other entries to achieve comparability and fairness. However, such a strict set of rules could imply that some members would hesitate to participate, thus we could try out that for one competition, but should not apply it to all future ones.

In the past when we had competitions with monetary awards, the entrants were kept anonymous by sending their entries by personal message to me.  I would then add their entry to the submissions thread.  I think in a free contest, this requirement might be too strict.  And I personally don't like the idea of keeping the names of the judges anonymous because it discourages discussion and interaction between the judges and the members.

Thanks for voicing your opinion!