The CrossSong Puzzle: Developing a Logic Puzzle for Musical Thinking

There is considerable interest in music-based games and apps. However, in existing games, music generally serves as an accompaniment or as a reward for progress. We set out to design a game where paying attention to the music would be essential to making deductions and solving the puzzle. The result is the CrossSong Puzzle, a novel type of music-based logic puzzle that integrates musical and logical reasoning. The game presents a player with a grid of tiles, each representing a mash-up of excerpts from two different songs. The goal is to rearrange the tiles so that each row and column plays a continuous musical excerpt. To create puzzles, we implemented an algorithm to automatically identify a set of song fragments to fill a grid such that each tile contains an acceptable mash-up. We present several optimisations to speed up the search for high-quality grids. We also discuss the iterative design of the game’s interface and present the results of a user evaluation of the final design. Finally, we present some insights learned from the experience which we believe are important to developing music-based puzzle games that are entertaining, feasible and that challenge one’s ability to think about music.