
With Musical Cryptography, Composers Can Hide Messages in Their Melodies - tintinnabula
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/musical-cryptography-codes
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slx26
Yes, as others have mentioned, this is steganography, not cryptography.
Basically, encoding a second message inside, in this case, a piece of music.
If we want to talk about cryptography, we could say this resembles more
simple, classic substitution ciphers.

Now, about encoding messages in music... I think there are many more
interesting possibilities. For example, instead of words, you might encode
more music itself. Digital music formats specially offer quite a lot of new
ways to write 'secrets' in your music. Pitch and rhythm are related [1], and
even though current digital music formats are not designed for this, you could
technically write songs with other songs inside, at very different time
scales. Surely someone will write hidden tracks like this in the future. Other
possibilities could include encoding messages using specific frequencies (for
example, inaudible frequencies, but not necessarily), which would be fun
because you can encode messages in more traditional ways, not associating
notes and lengths to letters, but numbers from specific frequencies (I think
this would be currently feasible as long as files are not
compressed/modified), so you could translate to more traditional, actual
cryptography. Sorry if I went a bit off-topic, but I find all this so
interesting!

[1] [https://youtu.be/_gCJHNBEdoc](https://youtu.be/_gCJHNBEdoc) super fun and
educative video by Adam Neely, his work is worth checking out!

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Asooka
There is Neil Cicierega's Mouth Silence (a mashup album), where if you
concatenate several of the songs and play them at 1600x speed, you get
snippets of several songs by Smash Mouth -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAJQQymhn9o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAJQQymhn9o)
(this particular easter egg starts at 3:40, but the rest of the video is fun,
too)

~~~
molloy
Thanks for sharing!

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jancsika
You could also have nation states express the supremacy of their computing
power through Beatcoins(tm).

sha256(my_awesome_nonce) where the bit pattern of the output is the sixteenth-
note rhythms of the melody from the beginning of the first movement of
Beethoven's Fifth. (zero = note off, one = note on)

So instead of going to war, China, U.S. and Russia sign their awesome nonces
and we see which one ends up with the most Beethoven in their output. The
winner wins the war.

~~~
tomsmeding
This would be an awesome way to "wage war". I fear that it isn't cool enough
for people, but it sure would be interesting.

Next question: once they have that cpmputational power, if they stop using it
to encode Beethoven, what would they be able to compute? I don't believe that
general AI will arrive soon, but it would he interesting to see the
possibilities.

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fwn
This looks to me like steganography, not cryptography.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography)

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biot
It’s plain old steganography that can often manipulate media, especially note
text.

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jacquesm
BACH has them beat:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BACH_motif](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BACH_motif)

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randomerr
This is something that has been going on for centuries. With tempo, notes, and
melodies you have quite of variety of way to encrypt a message. I had a friend
who would do this for fun. But said that only the trained ear could pick up on
his messages. Also he could only squeeze in a limited amount of information
before it became obvious what he was doing. Still it was fun to watch him
write the music.

~~~
bitwize
In Colombia, the authorities commissioned a pop song intended for radio
airplay. While the tune and lyrics were innocuous, poppy stuff, a synth
breakdown in the middle was actually a Morse message to FARC hostages:
something like "19 rescued. More to come. Don't give up hope." What's really
impressive is how they used the drums and accompaniment to make the oddly-
rhythmed Morse sound like part of the song.

~~~
seba_dos1
That's "Better Days" by Natalia Gutierrez Y Angelo -
[https://www.theverge.com/2015/1/7/7483235/the-code-
colombian...](https://www.theverge.com/2015/1/7/7483235/the-code-colombian-
army-morsecode-hostages)

[https://soundcloud.com/michael-zelenko/better-days-by-
natali...](https://soundcloud.com/michael-zelenko/better-days-by-natalia-
gutierrez-y-angelo)

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mrspeaker
First "Aphex Twin Face" post!
[http://www.bastwood.com/?page_id=10](http://www.bastwood.com/?page_id=10)

But also, I love secret messages and easter eggs - even if they aren't
mathematically secure! I try to smuggle in an easter egg or two to everything
I touch. Does anyone have go-to resources for entertaining ciphers, hidden
messages, or interesting stories like this? I think it's fascinating.

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rjmunro
This is part of the plot in the Tom Hanks film The Man with One Red Shoe.
Someone suspects that there is code hidden in the music that he plays, and
uses a department of defence computer to try to decode it.

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wazoox
That's from the plot of "The Lady Vanishes" (1938) :)

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pwaivers
So would it be possible to literally talk through music? What if notes (or
strings of notes) stood for different words and ideas. It would be like a set
of pictograms, but for music.

~~~
notduncansmith
Yes (that’s what spoken language is).

You might enjoy a trip down the wiki hole starting here:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication_theory](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication_theory)

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TheOtherHobbes
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enigma_Variations](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enigma_Variations)

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deft
Oh no they could also encode illegal data!

