4 ms·

With Musical Cryptography, Composers Can Hide Messages in Their Melodies

55 points by tintinnabula 9y ago

pwaivers 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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
- asdsa5325 9y ago
  There is an almost dead language that used melodic whistling to communicate. It was originally used so people could communicate over larger distances (carries further than yelling). There are still a few people left who speak it.
- paliilap 9y ago
  There's a constructed language called Solresol which works on this idea. It uses the 7 notes of the major scale (or the solfege system) to communicate, and this simple fact makes it quite flexible because it could technically be projected onto any 7-unit system (e.g. colours of the rainbow, hand symbols, pictographs). I don't know how practical it is and it seems to be quite obscure nowadays, but it's got some interesting ideas. Antonyms, for example, are constructed by a phrase performed in retrograde. Its a very minimal system which makes the vocabulary somewhat constrained, but flexibility of it is pretty neat since you can vary the method of communication once you know the basic system.
- KineticLensman 9y ago
  The Talking Drums [0] of Africa used the pitch of the drum to mimic the tone patterns of speech. They were used to communicate between different villages, sometimes using known phrases from poems to encode more complex concepts. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talking_drum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talking_drum
randomerr 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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.
  - grzm 9y ago
    Rush's "YYZ" is another example I think is pretty impressive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YYZ_(instrumental)#Title_and_composition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YYZ_(instrumental)#Title_and_c...
    - bitwize 9y ago
      That reminds me of another great one: one of the tracks to my favorite game, Rez, has a lonely synth riff that allegedly was "TIME" in Morse, repeated. Upon listening, it's plausible if you are bit loose with the rhythm of the dits and dahs. https://youtu.be/NUOLVnPGOSE https://youtu.be/NUOLVnPGOSE
  - seba_dos1 9y ago
    That's "Better Days" by Natalia Gutierrez Y Angelo - https://www.theverge.com/2015/1/7/7483235/the-code-colombian-army-morsecode-hostages https://www.theverge.com/2015/1/7/7483235/the-code-colombian... https://soundcloud.com/michael-zelenko/better-days-by-natalia-gutierrez-y-angelo https://soundcloud.com/michael-zelenko/better-days-by-natali...
biot 9y ago
It’s plain old steganography that can often manipulate media, especially note text.
wazoox 9y ago
That's from the plot of "The Lady Vanishes" (1938) :)
fwn 9y ago
This looks to me like steganography, not cryptography. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography
mrspeaker 9y ago
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.
slx26 9y ago
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!
- marzell 9y ago
  On the digital side of things, here's an example [1] from Aphex Twin that was done some time ago. [1] https://thump.vice.com/en_ca/article/nzm7mz/is-the-image-hidden-in-aphex-twins-equation-the-best-easter-egg-in-electronic-music https://thump.vice.com/en_ca/article/nzm7mz/is-the-image-hid...
- Asooka 9y ago
  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 9y ago
jancsika 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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.
TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enigma_Variations https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enigma_Variations
deft 9y ago
Oh no they could also encode illegal data!
jacquesm 9y ago
BACH has them beat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BACH_motif https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BACH_motif
rjmunro 9y ago
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.

55 points by tintinnabula 9y ago

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 9y ago
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
asdsa5325 9y ago
There is an almost dead language that used melodic whistling to communicate. It was originally used so people could communicate over larger distances (carries further than yelling). There are still a few people left who speak it.
paliilap 9y ago
There's a constructed language called Solresol which works on this idea. It uses the 7 notes of the major scale (or the solfege system) to communicate, and this simple fact makes it quite flexible because it could technically be projected onto any 7-unit system (e.g. colours of the rainbow, hand symbols, pictographs). I don't know how practical it is and it seems to be quite obscure nowadays, but it's got some interesting ideas. Antonyms, for example, are constructed by a phrase performed in retrograde. Its a very minimal system which makes the vocabulary somewhat constrained, but flexibility of it is pretty neat since you can vary the method of communication once you know the basic system.
KineticLensman 9y ago
The Talking Drums [0] of Africa used the pitch of the drum to mimic the tone patterns of speech. They were used to communicate between different villages, sometimes using known phrases from poems to encode more complex concepts. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talking_drum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talking_drum

randomerr 9y ago

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 9y ago
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.
- grzm 9y ago
  Rush's "YYZ" is another example I think is pretty impressive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YYZ_(instrumental)#Title_and_composition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YYZ_(instrumental)#Title_and_c...
  - bitwize 9y ago
    That reminds me of another great one: one of the tracks to my favorite game, Rez, has a lonely synth riff that allegedly was "TIME" in Morse, repeated. Upon listening, it's plausible if you are bit loose with the rhythm of the dits and dahs. https://youtu.be/NUOLVnPGOSE https://youtu.be/NUOLVnPGOSE
- seba_dos1 9y ago
  That's "Better Days" by Natalia Gutierrez Y Angelo - https://www.theverge.com/2015/1/7/7483235/the-code-colombian-army-morsecode-hostages https://www.theverge.com/2015/1/7/7483235/the-code-colombian... https://soundcloud.com/michael-zelenko/better-days-by-natalia-gutierrez-y-angelo https://soundcloud.com/michael-zelenko/better-days-by-natali...

biot 9y ago

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

wazoox 9y ago

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

fwn 9y ago

This looks to me like steganography, not cryptography. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography

mrspeaker 9y ago

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.

slx26 9y ago

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!

marzell 9y ago
On the digital side of things, here's an example [1] from Aphex Twin that was done some time ago. [1] https://thump.vice.com/en_ca/article/nzm7mz/is-the-image-hidden-in-aphex-twins-equation-the-best-easter-egg-in-electronic-music https://thump.vice.com/en_ca/article/nzm7mz/is-the-image-hid...
Asooka 9y ago
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 9y ago

jancsika 9y ago

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 9y ago
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.

TheOtherHobbes 9y ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enigma_Variations https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enigma_Variations

deft 9y ago

Oh no they could also encode illegal data!

jacquesm 9y ago

BACH has them beat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BACH_motif https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BACH_motif

rjmunro 9y ago

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.