How to use the cards

There are two main ways to use the cards: Free Play, or Idea Game. Of course, they can be used in any way that you feel is right.

Free Play

Once you have an idea for a digital score, or are in the process of developing one, you can choose any card at random and use that for an open conversation. You can pick any number of cards from anywhere in the pack or read them all.

Idea Game

The Idea Game has been designed to guide you through the design, development and testing of a digital score. There are several phases that lead you and your team through digital score creation. The most important thing is that you arrive at a digital score concept and test it out as soon as possible. Digital scores package musical ideas, but the point of them is for those packaged ideas to be realised by other musicians. Prioritising body-storming over brainstorming is key, as the only true place to evaluate your digital score is by turning it into music.

Phase 1 - idea generation

  • 1.1 Write down a couple of imaginative ideas for a digital score or a musical composition. Artistic vision stuff. What is your musical idea about? What bit of culture/ humanity/ news/ life are you wishing to make music about? (10 minutes)

For each of these ideas in turn:

  • 1.2 Take 3 opportunity cards (+) and spend 5 minutes (time it), exploring how each of the cards would change, enhance, transform, expand, deform, or diminish your idea. (See Open conversations with the cards in main page).

  • 1.3 Take another 3 opportunity cards (+) and repeat the 5-minute open conversation.

  • 1.4 One last round of 3 opportunity cards (+) and repeat the 5-minute open conversation.

  • 1.5 Move on to the next idea.

Phase 2 - idea development

  • 2.1 choose one of your ideas to explore further.

  • 2.2 Draw 2 challenge cards (-) and 2 question cards (?). Spend 5 minutes exploring how your idea transforms because of these cards.

  • 2.3 Repeat 2 more times with chosen idea (another 2+2 cards, and 5 minutes)

Phase 3 - idea realization

  • 3.1 Discuss the core of your digital score (10-15 minutes) As a group discuss what the core experience is with your digital score (see examples below). This is to be the focus of your experiments. The aim is to get to the TRUTH of the experience of your digital score idea. This TRUTH is the undeniable experience of your digital score and the foundation of what is being communicated. Be prepared to be surprised by this – what you “think” is being communicated might not be in practice. Discussed in more detail here LINK

  • 3.2 Make a rapid prototype version of your digital score (60-90 minutes) This requires you to be amazingly creative and inventive. The priority is to turn your digital score into music, and in doing so find the TRUTH of the experience by testing out the core communications system of your digital score.

see page on Rapid Prototyping LINK