Composers, it is time to dive into the Art Portal and put our inspirations into music as the 11th Art-Inspired Music Contest is starting next month!

The Art-Inspired Music Contest (AIM) is a yearly competition that runs on Newgrounds. Composers pick a piece of art from the Newgrounds Art Portal and create a track inspired by that work of art. A panel of judges evaluate the submissions and the winning 20 entries (top 3 + 17 runner-ups) are included in a compilation album on the Art-Inspired Music Bandcamp!

The submissions period for AIM 2024 will be open from April 19th and close on June 17th. Times will be in PST, but the official start of the contest will be determined by the posting of the submissions thread (to be done in the Audio Forums. A link will also be shared at the top of this news post!).

Right now, this is a time to start thinking about what art you may want to use as inspiration for your entry, but DO NOT start working on your entry until the submissions thread is posted.

This is also a time to start considering if you'd like to be a part of the judging panel for this year's compo or contribute some prizes.

Judges and Prizes

We are currently looking for users to help judge the submissions and contribute prizes for the compo.

Judges

We normally have 3 judges per compo (plus me), but I would love to have a couple more judges on hand this year if possible.

Judges will be responsible for listening to and evaluating all approved entries during the submissions period to help determine the winners. The official judging period starts once the submissions period ends (June 17), but you can also start listening to the entries as they come in.

Prizes

We are looking for some prize donations or suggestions. Something along the lines of a cash pool, product keys, etc.

Rules

The rules of the contest will be shared with the submissions thread. You can see a list of last year's rules here if you want to have an idea of what they will be like. Most of these rules, if not all, should still be the same, but there will most likely be some adjustments in regards to the Art Portal now allowing multiple images to be uploaded under one link.

I haven't completely decided how to handle this yet. Previously, multiple art inspirations for one entry were not allowed and I think I would like to keep it so that only one art link can be used as inspiration per entry. The same art can be used for multiple different submissions, but a submission cannot have more than one inspiration. This is mainly for judging purposes in which "Art Relevance" is a scoring factor and part of having a higher score, imo, is how much inspiration one can draw from a specific piece of art. If more than one inspiration (for the purposes of this contest) were allowed for one entry, it would create issues in regards to composers picking and choosing elements from multiple pieces of art to use as inspiration for their one track. Of course outside of the compo, this is not a bad thing at all, but for the purposes of AIM, it just muddies things a little too much.

The main challenge with the multiple images on one art link is that there doesn't seem to be a way to share a specific image within that art link - it always defaults to the first image. The other challenge is when comics are used as inspiration. In the past, a single page would often be presented as an inspiration (which in of itself has multiple pictures within their panels) - but I'm not sure if I would want to encourage or allow an entire comic to become the inspiration, as I see comics being a bit more like videos, with a sequential sort of narrative and I would preferably like to stick to stills or a fixed scene with some light/simple animation.

I'm currently considering the following options:

1. Disallow any multi-image inspirations to be used for AIM.
2. Allow multi-image inspirations to be used for AIM, but not allow multi-page comics. For art with multiple images, the first image that loads when viewing the art link would be considered the inspiration that is judged.

I'll have to think more about this and will likely update this post as I have or hear more thoughts on this matter.

Questions?

If you have any general questions or feedback regarding AIM, feel free to share in the comments below. Thanks and hope to see you participate!