PromptVision 2026: A Country You Can Hear

Create the sonic identity of an imaginary digital country, starting from an image, and compete in a Eurovision-style listening show.

Creative brief

Work in a team of 2–3. Invent a country and write a 40–60-word backstory explaining its world, traditions or people. Choose one source image from Artistic Telephone, another image you made, or a provided example. More than one team may use the same image.

Find three visual qualities and translate them into sound. Prompt for genre or style, mood, tempo/rhythm, instrumentation or sound textures, and development over time. Generate a composition, compare an alternative prompt or version and note what you revised.

Use MiniMax Music 2.6 for the main competition. Choose one final composition between 60 and 120 seconds (1–2 minutes). If your generation is longer, trim or export the strongest 1–2-minute section. Songs, instrumentals, ambient pieces and experimental soundscapes are equally welcome; lyrics are optional. You can write your own, use the model’s lyrics generation or produce an instrumental. Record any custom lyrics in entry.txt. Then generate a new cover image that represents your finished music. This is a quick creative prompting exercise, not a polished graphic design assignment.

Permission to be wonderfully absurd

Need inspiration for the Eurovision spirit? Watch Tommy Cash’s Espresso Macchiato (Estonia, Eurovision 2025). It leans into an exaggerated character, an earworm hook, playful language and a deliberately ridiculous concept.

Your imaginary country can be equally strange. Maybe its national anthem is sung by a parliament of pigeons, its citizens dance only during thunderstorms, or its traditional instruments are made from kitchen appliances. The point is not to copy the song or its jokes, but to give your country a distinctive story, sound and visual identity. Have fun, surprise us, and make the absurdity feel intentional.

Submit four files

Upload to your team’s numbered SWITCHdrive folder using the country name and entry number assigned in class:

PromptVision/
  01_NeonRepublic/
    track.mp3
    source.png
    cover.png
    entry.txt
  02_Fogland/
    ...

The filenames are important for the automated presentation. Audio may alternatively use .wav, .m4a or .ogg; images may use .jpg, .jpeg or .webp. Keep one track, one source and one cover, named exactly as above apart from the extension.

Fill out entry.txt (long answers can continue on a new line):

Country: Neon Republic
Title: Signals from Tomorrow
Story: Our cities drift across a permanent night. Citizens send
  melodies between towers to find their way home. Once a year,
  they gather their signals into one anthem, hoping the warmth
  of their music will bring back the first sunrise.
Model: minimax/music-2.6
Prompt: Slow cinematic electronics with deep bass, sparse metallic
  percussion and a warm melody that emerges gradually.
Translation: Blue fog became sustained synths; huge buildings
  became deep bass; a distant light became a rising melody.
Iteration: We removed the fast beat for a slower pulse.
Lyrics: [Optional. Include any words sung in the final track.]

Do not upload tokens, private attempts or files you lack rights to share. The cover is required, but if it is late the presenter temporarily shows the source with a warning so the music can still play.

The listening party and Eurovision voting

Listen first (20 minutes). We will display each country’s name, fictional backstory, cover image and original source image, then play an excerpt of its composition. Listen to all the countries before voting. Take quick notes as you go, for example:

Country	What stood out?	Possible favorite?
Republic of Echo	Strange synthesizers, hopeful ending	Yes
Fogland	Funny lyrics, irresistible rhythm	Maybe

The show normally uses excerpts of up to 75 seconds. With many entries, we may listen to shorter excerpts so that every country gets its moment.

Decide together (about 5 minutes). Your team is one national jury. Discuss the entries and agree on a ranked list of your favorite other countries. Consider originality, personality, the relationship between the story and the sound, and what you genuinely enjoyed. Absurd ideas are welcome! You cannot vote for your own country.

In the classic Eurovision system, a jury awards 12 points to its favorite, 10 to its second choice, 8 to its third, then 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2 and 1. If there are too few countries for ten eligible choices, we will announce a shorter points system before voting.

Send your jury’s vote. One representative submits one ballot per team using the ScoreWiz voting link given in class. Rank the countries in the agreed order; do not submit separate votes as individuals.

Watch the results (about 15 minutes). After all juries have voted, we will switch from our listening page to the ScoreWiz scoreboard. Country-by-country points will be revealed, Eurovision-style, until we have a PromptVision winner.

The full music prompts and optional lyrics stay hidden during the listening and voting. After the results, we can reveal some of those creative choices and discuss what worked, what surprised us and what was lost or gained when translating the original images into sound. The presentation shows your country backstory, generated cover and original source image before playback. The live show normally plays 75 seconds, with a full-track option; only afterward do we reveal the prompt, optional lyrics and creative translation. Your submitted audio must still be 1–2 minutes.

Each country is also a jury. Your team votes together in ScoreWiz, ranking other entries and never voting for yourselves. Consider both what you enjoy and how effectively the composition expresses the intended creative identity.