Lyrics Quizzes

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arctanproject

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Mar 8, 2013, 1:58:23 PM3/8/13
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Hello everyone!

I'm arctanproject and I'm a long-time player, but relatively new quiz creator, so I'd like to take some time to introduce myself.

I'm a 24-year old from Toronto who's big on music. My favourite type of quiz to play is a lyrics quiz where you guess each and every single word in the song (e.g. like this, and not like this or like this).
I've played through dozens of my favourite songs - as luck would have it, I'm a big fan of The Beatles and Taylor Swift, for which it seems like there's a quiz for every song.
My taste in music isn't too too diverse: classic rock, rock n' roll, arena rock, hair metal, moving into pop, pop rock, punk pop, and so on.

I'm a huge fan of these quizzes, and it's always a pleasant surprise to find a combination of a song that I like, that has a quiz, and that I have a reasonable chance of not embarrassing myself with the results. Over the past few months, whenever I search for a song and I find that there's no quiz, or the quiz is either poorly done or not in the format that I like, I've always thought, "This sucks, they didn't make a quiz for _____". It never really occurred to me that I'm part of they, and that I could be the solution.

So, I took it upon myself to play around with the quiz creator tool, and to come up with a system where I can churn out high-quality lyrics quizzes at a reasonably-fast rate.
By high quality, I'm referring to doing my due diligence around capitalization, punctuation, spelling (and alternate spellings), alternate answers for debatable words, more columns to reduce scrolling, and doing the little things like accepting "oh" for "whoa" that makes people not pull out their hair.

So far, I've contributed 17 quizzes, but I have a number in the pipeline, both already coded into Sporcle and saved onto my computer.
My most popular quiz to date is Layla, but I'm happy to see my non-highlighted quizzes get plays because it means that somewhere out there, someone like me entered the song into the search bar, and hopefully found a fun, quality quiz that satisfied them for eight minutes or less.

If you have questions, comments, concerns, recommendations, or requests, please let me know! Like I said, I do have a number of songs in the pipeline, but I'm always happy to be introduced or re-introduced to a great song.

Thanks for reading!

Cheers,

arctanproject

needapausebutton

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Mar 8, 2013, 3:03:05 PM3/8/13
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Welcome to the quiz-making fold, arctanproject!  It looks like you'll be contributing quality quizzes and paying attention to your comments, so I'm sure that lyrics lovers will be enjoying a lot of fine quizzes from you.

- napb

iglew

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Mar 8, 2013, 3:11:00 PM3/8/13
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Hi arctanproject,

It sounds like you and I have different taste in music, but I share your love for lyrics quizzes. (And even more for poem quizzes, which are the same idea.)

Glancing at your quizzes, I admire your attention to quality detail.  I don't think there's any more I could suggest to you, but for anyone else who might stumble across this thread and want to try their hand, I'd like to spell out recommendations more explicitly:

1. First and foremost, set it to six columns!  In a lyrics quiz each answer is only one word so you don't need the width.  It's so annoying to do a lyrics quiz where there are only three columns and the scroll off the bottom of the screen.

2. Use punctuation. This includes capitalization where it is called for and not where it is not. Lyrics quizzes are most fun when the player is only half familiar with the lyrics and has to piece them together. The punctuation offers subtle clues for this guessing process.

3. Don't trust the lyrics sites on the Web. There are dozens of these and they're often sloppy and unreliable. If printed lyrics are available on a sleeve or published sheet music, use that. (Original publisher only; the cheap knock-off sheet music offered online is also unreliable.)  Lacking either of those, check several lyrics websites and check for inconsistencies to resolve. If a song has one definitive recording, listen to it yourself and trust your own ear over what somebody else typed up.  If a song has multiple renditions, note in the quiz which one you're using.

4. Check for alternate spellings. Offer alternates for words that might reasonably be spelled differently. Also, while most punctuation marks are invisible to Sporcle, some are not (like dashes or parentheses) so be sure to include alternates for those, too.

5. Add a touch of color. You don't need much. Just some light color for the background is plenty.

6. If your song (or poem) divides neatly into verses or stanzas, consider grouping them. Give each section a label in the hint column and then click the option to group by hint. If you like, you can have these appear as headings ("Verse 1", "Verse 2", "Chorus", etc), or if you don't then set the heading style to white on white so that they don't appear.  This only works well if the verses are approximately the same length. If it messes up the overall page layout too much then don't do it.

7. If you have a chorus that repeats, consider replacing it with a single line that says something like "(chorus)" rather than repeating all the words separately. Give that line an alternate so that it shows when the first (or most prominent) word of the chorus is typed, or else set it to appear automatically on start with "go".

arctanproject

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Apr 2, 2013, 8:02:35 PM4/2/13
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Hey all!

About two weeks ago, I had reached out to manonthemoon (the Lyrics curator) via email with some questions. He (she? I guess it's a "he"... he's not womanonthemoon) hasn't yet replied, and I noticed that he hasn't made a Curator Pick since Jan 10/13.

Does anyone know what happened to manonthemoon?

While I have your attention, maybe you can shed some light on my questions to manonthemoon.

I'm curious as to what curators and editors look for when they or Sporcle feature a Lyrics game.
As has been said on Sporcle University in the past, with the style of quiz, I feel like there's only so much I can do. I can fix punctuation, give alternates, make the layout six columns... but there's not much more.
There are times where I can do a bit more, like with my Barbie Girl quiz where I've colour-coded the parts of Barbie and Ken, but opportunities to do things like that are few and far between.

Is it genre that they look for? The popularity of the underlying song? Whether the song appears in a movie, TV show, etc.?
I hope it's not the reference, because I really only cite lyrics websites because I want to provide some reference. I do start with the lyrics as posted on a lyrics website, but after I add punctuation and fix all the errors, you can't tell it came from the website a lot of the time.

I feel that because there's only so much that you can do with lyrics quizzes, it's that much more important for the Lyrics curator to stay active and keep an eye out for quizzes to promote. If the curator doesn't, no one will (because the editor and Sporcle admins will have far more "interesting" quizzes to feature).

Cheers,

needapausebutton

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Apr 3, 2013, 4:59:52 PM4/3/13
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Hey everybody,

manonthemoon has been a close Sporcle friend of mine for some time.  A few months ago, he let me know, and informed Matt, that he would have to take a “leave of absence” for an indeterminate amount of time to deal with personal matters.

Since I am still in touch with him, I just let him know about the above post by arctanproject.

He has asked me to express to the forum readers, and to you specifically, of course, arctanproject, that he is hoping to resume his curating in the near future; hopefully later this month, and certainly as soon as he can.  At that point he’ll be able to also respond to e-mail inquiries, including any he had received recently but not been able to respond to.

He wants to also express his appreciation to other curators, editors, and the administration, for their support, and for the fact that many of his own quizzes have continued to be generously recognized either with “picks here and there”,  or publishes.

- napb

arctanproject

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Apr 3, 2013, 6:00:38 PM4/3/13
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Thanks for the info, napb!

There's definitely no denying manonthemoon's contributions to Sporcle, in many different forms.
I wish him all the best with what he's going through, and I'm confident I'm not the only one eagerly awaiting his return!


beforever

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Apr 5, 2013, 3:54:40 AM4/5/13
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It's good to know he has received the e-mails from myself personally, and via a CP I made for the Vocabulary section. It was a fun quiz, as were 'BRA' Fittings and Speed Typing: 1 - 20 in 30 published recently. Like arctanproject, I'm looking forward to seeing him back and wishing him the best.
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