I have this idea of promoting a contest to choose the GNOME Song.
IMHO, this is kind of activity promotes community integration and
helps creating passionate users™. Also, having a GNOME Song would be cool for marketing stuff! My intension is to put the several recordings of GNOME Song from several people around the world in the GNOME CVS repository. l10n work could be done on recordings with translated versions of the lyrics. Isn’t it awesome!?
I’ve prepared a draft here. This is far from complete/stable. I want suggestions about the submission process and how to rate the submissions. Also, not sure about the best release date yet.
Comments?
PS: Jono, this could a great oportunity for Jokosher to get more users. You could release a tutorial teaching how to easily record melody submissions only with rocking free software. :-)
Hey there — as a songwriter and GNOME user and programmer, I’m psyched about this idea.
The only thing I’d say is that I’m not entirely sure about the separation of the melody and the lyric stage. A fundamental part of a lyric is how it fits to a melody. People who write lyrics without hearing a melody inevitably make poor choices about rhythm and scansion that they correct naturally when they set the lyric to music (especially inexperienced people — perhaps expert lyricists naturally make the right moves even without music).
I do get the idea of using different aptitudes, and obviously there have been many a great pairing of lyricist and composer in the world of song… but perhaps rather than having two phases, you could have people submit any of the three combos — lyrics, melodies, or lyrics with melodies. Then others could tweak, refine, or recombine any subset of the three until the best song was created.
How about ‘White and Nerdy’ by Weird Al? :-)
jonny215