Hyperscore Challenge Prompts

Excited about this year’s Hyperscore Challenge? We are, too! Read about the 2025 Hyperscore Challenge and sign up here to get your free account.

Find prompts to get you started on this page. Prompts are short, silent video clips that need your music. Choose a prompt and create a Hyperscore soundtrack to accompany the video clip. Starting in March 2025, we’ll release new prompts each week. Be sure to create pieces in your Hyperscore Challenge group profile in order to access all Hyperscore features.

Week 1 — March 10, 2025

Spring is just around the corner! We celebrate the season with our first Hyperscore Challenge prompt, full of adorable, fluffy newly-hatched birds. From the excitement of a chick breaking through its eggshell to the cacophony of cheeping, imagine the music these chatty, hungry, and sometimes-sleepy young avians make!

The vacuum of outer space may mean that there’s little to no sound out there. Yet some of the most memorable pieces of music, and especially movie and television scores, are inspired by the universe beyond Earth. Mysterious, dramatic, beautiful, or surprising? What does life among the stars sound like to you?

Next, let’s take as a prompt this video of a girl teaching her new robot friend how to dance! What music do you think they are dancing to?

Now we head back to nature with sunlit trees and a few grazing sheep, for good measure. How do different places and different times of day make you feel? How can you capture the feeling of warm sunlight in music?

To close out our first batch of prompts, here is a gameplay video of an abstract, geometric world that evokes action and emotion by the way the viewer navigates a matrix of white lines. This video is ambiguous and provides a wide-open playground for your musical imagination.

Week 2 — March 17, 2025

Traffic, people, and the blinking signs and lights of towering buildings create a bustling atmosphere of different rhythms and activity. Cities are alive with their own sort of music and sounds. What do you hear in the different parts of your city? What music do these city images suggest to you?

Week 3 — March 24, 2025

Our first Hyperscore Challenge prompt for this week features a clip of gameplay from the puzzle-platform game Fez. Hyperscore is a great tool for composing background music and audio sprites for games of all sorts, including ones you can make on your own.

The second prompt this week is an amusing romp from the classic film archives. Charlie Chaplain’s lovable character and quirky antics are just the thing to be accompanied by a playful soundtrack made by you!

Week 4 — March 31, 2025

Computer animated films can tell stories that are both relatable and fantastic in a compelling and stylized way. Here’s an abridged excerpt of the computer animation short Watermelon: A Cautionary Tale by Kefei Li and Connie Qin He featured by CG Meetup. What is the soundtrack you’d create for this story?

What do computers dream about when we’re not using them? A very different kind of computer animation, this prompt features clips of evolving fractal flames generated by the algorithms developed by Scott Draves for his Electric Sheep distributed computing project that started in 1999. The project takes its name from the Philip K. Dick short story “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” which was later made into the iconic movie Bladerunner. Drave’s Electric Sheep project relied on users to install a screensaver that would generate and upload to the Internet the colorful and mesmerizing images that idle computers around the world created. That’s all well and good, but what do you think these fractal dreams sound like? Now its your turn to compose the soundtrack for these mathematical fantasies.

Week 5 — April 7, 2025

Our first prompt for Week 5 includes another sequence from a silent film. The classic tale of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has been adapted from Lewis Carroll novel many times. The ever-changing landscape and curious companions Alice meets are sure to evoke all sorts of musical ideas.

From urban rooftops to warehouses, this dance video has a gritty hip-hop vibe. What music do you imagine this fellow is dancing to?

Week 6 – April 14, 2025

So many things in life have a natural rhythm to them, as we’ve seen in the Hyperscore Challenge prompts thus far. The art of juggling is no exception. As balls cycle through the air and deft hands keep them afloat, the hypnotic ups and downs are simultaneously precarious—the carefully-timed system could fall apart at any moment—and whimsically amusing. It’s no wonder that this uniquely human talent has endured for millennia. The earliest known evidence of juggling dates back nearly 4000 years in Egypt and China, but likely was practiced well before that. Now it’s your turn to imagine a musical accompaniment to this mesmerizing pastime. Your score might even work well with the prompt video as an endless loop! (Note, you can enable and disable looping playback in Hyperscore by pressing the L key.)

Week 7 – April 21, 2025

We return to video games for this week’s first prompt with gameplay clips from the open-source racing game Supertux Kart. The high-speed, playful nature of racing games like this provide an opportunity to compose an accompanying soundtrack that gets the player’s adrenaline flowing. In addition to every twist and turn on the racecourse, the music can also provide sound effects for the obstacles, rewards, bumps, and spin-outs that competitors encounter.

We also have another classic film this week: the comedic antics of Snub Pollard. In this excerpt from the film Flip Flops, things go awry when fleas are surreptitiously added to a lovely bouquet of flowers.

Week 8 – April 28, 2025

Step dancing is a form of dance defined by a focus on rhythmic, percussive footwork. There are many forms of step dancing in cultures throughout the world. This weeks prompt includes clips of Irish step dance. Can you imagine what it sounds like? Can you feel the rhythm? Does your score feature percussion, or is in a lush texture that connects each step beat?

For something completely different, this computer animated short film brings drama, comedy, and redemption, as a group of adorable dust bunnies escape a housekeeper wielding a vacuum.

Week 9 – May 5, 2025

While there has been some hype around the recent remake of the classic vampire film Nosferatu: A symphony of horror, nothing can top the original 1922 film by the great F.W. Murnau. It’s a silent film, but it has “symphony” in it’s title, so it’s up to you to compose it!

Have you ever had that good feeling of completing something that you imagined and worked hard to make happen? Maybe it’s an idea for a musical piece that you were able to compose with Hyperscore. Maybe it’s a project for school that came out just the way you hoped it would. Imagine all of the hard work that goes into constructing a building from digging a hole in the ground to watching it reach into the sky! This week’s prompt is a time lapse video of just that. And not just any building, but the new MIT Media Lab building that was completed in 2010 right next door to the building in which Hyperscore was originally created.

Week 10 – May 12, 2025

This week’s first prompt combines a number of things we at New Harmony Line love: fantastic visuals, programming, and games. And music, of course… yours! This teaser video, courtesy of creator Bobby Lockhart, is for the new educational fantasy game Codemancer that explores the “magic” of programming. All this video is missing is your score. Stay tuned to meet Bobby on an upcoming episode of our Reimagining Music podcast. In the mean time, check out Codemancer, too.

Beyond the world of digital creation, the rhythmic musicality of machines has fascinated artists of all sorts. In the 1920s, a number of silent-era filmmakers were also inspired to capture the visual music of the mechanical and industrial world, from Ballet Mécanique (1924) by Fernand Léger and scored by George Antheil to “city symphony” films, such as Walter Ruttmann’s famous Berlin (1927). Silent films were never meant to be truly silent, with live musical accompaniment reflecting the on-screen action. This week, our prompt comes from Dziga Vertov’s innovative 1929 film, Man with a Movie Camera. Imagine the mechanical music and mood it sets in your Hyperscore piece.

Week 11 – May 19, 2025

A solar eclipse is an exciting event and can confound the senses. Here’s our version of a solar eclipse that needs your soundtrack. Does it calmly flow and ebb or build to a climactic hit as darkness suddenly descends? We can’t wait to hear.

Week 12 – May 26, 2025

As summer is upon us, baseball season is in full swing (pun intended)! The sights and sounds of the game have familiar tunes, distinctive rhythms, from the electric crack of the bat to the roar of the crowd. Can you capture the thrill of the sport in your own Hyperscore soundtrack?

While baseball is seasonal, there’s another pastime that we enjoy year-round with rhythms all its own. A conversation can have a story, tension, resolution, changes in mood, dynamics, and more. This week’s Hyperscore Challenge prompt is an excerpt from the classic screwball comedy His Girl Friday (1940) in which stars Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant have a rapid-fire exchange that is the signature of this film. Without hearing the dialog, from their movements and expressions, can you imagine the musical version of this conversation?

Week 13 – June 2, 2025

We’ve already explored beneath the ocean’s surface. However, the rhythm of waves crashing on the shore, the call of seagulls, the warm sun, and the feeling of sand squishing between your toes all elicit that particular feeling of being on the beach. Create the sounds of a stroll along the strand or the feeling of wonder gazing out on an endless horizon in your Hyperscore piece.

While we can explore beach sands barefoot on Earth, the sometimes-sandy landscapes of other worlds require a different approach. Recent NASA rovers Curiosity and Perseverance (and the flying scout Ingenuity) have continued our quest to gather information about our planetary neighbor Mars. The rovers are equipped with a variety of tools and scientific instruments to take photographs, samples, and run analyses. These data are then sent back to Earth. When we see what these able robots find on the Martian surface, we can’t help but imagine that moment when humanity steps foot on another world. But first, let’s imagine what it would sound like? Can you make a soundscape impression of another planet? Or maybe the triumphant theme of these rovers’ arrival and exploration?

Week 14 – June 9, 2025

Music can change our perception of time, letting us dwell in a moment or making us feel like we’re flying through a journey. Photography also has the ability to manipulate time, letting us see things we can’t perceive with our eyes alone. This week, we watch the magical growth of plants, leaves, flowers, and fruit. Time-lapse photography lets us see just how productive and amazing plants are and in the space of time that can be accompanied by music. What do you think a growing plant sounds like? Can you capture the metamorphosis in your Hyperscore piece?

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And there we have it! Those are the prompts for the Hyperscore Challenge 2025. We hope that you enjoyed composing with them.

Each year, we prepare a showcase of Hyperscore Challenge compositions with their videos. If you would like to be featured, be sure to submit your Hyperscore piece through the online form by 16 June 2025. We can’t wait to hear them and share your submissions on 21 June for Make Music Day!

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Our prompts are chosen to appeal to widely varied interests and tastes. We hope they will surprise and challenge you to take your music to new places.

If you haven’t yet joined the Hyperscore Challenge, be sure to sign up as an individual or a team and get free access to the full set of Hyperscore features to create your Challenge scores.