Garison DeCrick said:
Speaking of relaxing, I was also very tempted to put in piano songs like kkcwkoh/kkcwkoh92's uploads or marasy8's pieces (those are just popular examples, I still don't want to reveal my lesser known picks just yet lol). But I feel they'd get rated lower due to their slow pace and how every note on the piano sounds the same. It's why I wasn't surprised when Buskerdog's "Hatsunetsumiko's - A Voiceless Poem" was rated low. (Though I do appreciate them taking the risk and putting it in regardless). Piano renditions were some of the first Touhou remixes I ever listened to, so I might just be biased by nostalgia towards them, but it really impressed me back then and I guess even now when you can get a normally intense in-game Touhou track and make it so... chill.
I think it's just the "tournament" format of this well... erh... tournament. It naturally encourages people to choose rarer more obscure songs since most of the time, I feel people unjustly see piano songs as mass produced relatively-easy-to-make "single soundfont midis". The current winning meta seem to be electronically-edited 3.5 to 4.5 minute songs with unique instruments, foreign vocals, a lower than 20k view count and an appealing digital drawing that's zoomed in somehow. Those are just my personal subjective opinions though.
I believe it's more a case of familiar songs being rated lower. The primary concept behind the tournament is sharing discoveries. While it's not impossible for some well-known and popular arrangements to be included, I think most of us don't see the point since it's highly likely that the others have already heard it. I wouldn't enter Alstroemeria Records
Bad Apple!! because I can be 99% sure you all have heard it before. That being said, I myself submitted Yuuhei Satellite's
Even the Blossoming Flowers will Eventually Scatter in the previous tournament, though mostly because I wasn't aware of how well-known it was (compared to some of the others, I'm still relatively new to the fandom).
As to the "meta," by far my favorite entry among the tournaments is
Photoshop CS⑨, a relatively relaxed piece. I actually appreciated the musical arrangement in
Voiceless Poem; my score was effected by the other elements of the piece (which I know you're familiar with). I won't deny though that the trend does seem to lean more toward upbeat synthesizer stuff. So for now, I'll consider this a challenge for future tournaments. ?
For the record, I try not to take the imagery into consideration on judging the piece.
On an unrelated note: If you haven't checked out the previous two tournaments, you really should do so! There are quite the treasures showcased in both! I'm thinking of reposting some of my orchestral entries from
Monthly Music Sharing into
Musical Discoveries to make them easier to find, but I'm not decided upon it yet.
Is one of them by chance Moon-Tone?
That would be interesting, but I'd be a bit intimidated to invite an actual music artist, especially without some kind of prior connection. I was initially thinking of a Bandcamp user called sumiyaani, since they were keeping tabs on my collection and seemed to have a varied familiarity of Touhou arrangements. But I've since found out they are Japanese, so between the language barrier and my lack of social media accounts, that isn't going to happen.
