Audio tournament
An audio tournament is a type of side event, pioneered by Jonathan Magin in 2011, which is played by listening to a series of pyramidally-ordered audio clips, rather than by reading a question on the page. (Their visual counterparts are visual tournaments.) In the early years, audio tournaments mostly focused on classical music, titled Imaginary Landscapes (after the pieces by John Cage). As the format proliferated, it began to include tournaments that focused on video game music, film music popular music, etc.
Until 2018, all such tournaments were housewritten by teams of a few writers/editors. In 2018, Ophir Lifshitz created the first of two Guerilla Imaginary Landscapes, in which each round was written and submitted by a different author, according to a distribution of their choosing, with limited central editing (see guerrilla).
During the COVID-19 pandemic, John Lawrence (who was one of the writers for the first Imaginary Landscape) invented an asynchronous variant called a remote cooperation audio tournament, in which individuals play the questions independently, the computer records everyone's typed answers and buzzpoint data, and tossups are awarded accordingly (sometimes by simulating matches between players or teams). The first such tournament was MARCATo (standing for Musical Arts Remote Cooperation Audio Tournament), written by Lawrence and Wonyoung Jang. The first few tournaments in this format were run on Qblitz, a platform designed by Noah Prince.
In 2025, Lawrence created and edited the first true packet-submission audio tournament, called PSALM (standing for Packet-Submission Appraisal of Listening to Music). Each round was based on a submission from an individual or team, according to a fixed distribution set by Lawrence, who then edited and replaced questions as needed.