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After Cicada and 11b-x-1371, I've been collecting some examples of coded messages in music for what I had hoped would be an article decoding a bunch of them, bu
by motohagiography 6y ago
After Cicada and 11b-x-1371, I've been collecting some examples of coded messages in music for what I had hoped would be an article decoding a bunch of them, but alas, I'm giving it up here instead.
There is a mysterious group called Gescom, who were associated with artists from the Warp label, whose samples I've done some decoding on with Audacity. Interestingly, Max Richter used to do work with Future Sound of London, and some of his pieces appear to have coded artifacts, most notably, the morse code on "Infra," and what appears to be either a map of the Thames or the bus route of the 7/7 bombers, and a couple of pieces with "Cypher" in the title.
I almost wish I'd spent more time on them before forfeiting the surprise in an HN comment, but I'm probably never going to finish it.
KMFDM's "blood evil" has some signal encoding at the end that you can hear and see in the spectrogram which I think might be a video signal, but I haven't figured out how to demodulate it.
In my own music to figure out how much trouble artists go to on these, I created a sample library of sound encoded images and use it on a very old sampler. The distinctive buzzing noise of an encoded image is something that grabs you once you know what it is, and the hunt begins!
(edit: can't bear to mention this without a shoutout to Master Boot Record and his mbrserver.com bbs as well)
- Minor49er 6y agoDo you have your music up anywhere? Your influences are ticking all of my boxes
- motohagiography 6y agoThanks! https://soundcloud.com/n-gram-music/sets/formalisms https://soundcloud.com/n-gram-music/sets/formalisms has the concept driven experiments. Details are in the track descriptions. 'look closer' was the morse and images test. The funnier one is 'brainfunk' which was to see if I could encode a brainfuck program in arbitrary lyrics. 'exegesis' is a riff on old 1950s dance instructions, but using PKD's description of what became The Matrix, but in the 70s. They're contrived, (hence formalisms) and the other play lists are more musical, but I thought these were still fun enough to share.
- LeoPanthera 6y agoGescom are supposed to have "close ties" to Autechre but I've always believed that Gescom are Autechre, and use the name as a brand for some of their off-script or collaborative work.
- isoprophlex 6y agoFor the longest time (until now) I've simply thought that gescom were a de facto alias of autechre...
- jlarcombe 6y agoyeah it's Autechre and a load of their mates isn't it?
- aasasd 6y ago> Incorrectly perceived as simply an Autechre side-project, Gescom in fact exists as a platform for a number of aligned artists to work in various different combinations, whilst remaining otherwise-anonymous. Personnel in Gescom has varied from release to release and even track to track. Quote from the Autechre FAQ: "Actually the whole Gescom crew consists of almost 20 people. Sean Booth calls it an 'umbrella-project'." https://www.discogs.com/artist/49-Gescom https://www.discogs.com/artist/49-Gescom
- motohagiography 6y agoOne of the Gescom samples from "corporate id" track, essentially you slow it down and reverse it and you get the phrase, "do, the things peo-ple say you cannot do." Ultimately, what was music but a way for a certain kind of mind to find and identify others of its kind? So these artists that are using novel encodings and ideas are essentially looking for others. I've got a limited amount of cycles for it, and I just hope they aren't aliens baiting a trap.
- stallmanite 6y agoWow thanks for the tip on "Blood-Evil" been a fan for decades and it never occurred to me. Also was really into Gescom back in the day so maybe people who like hiding data in recordings have good taste.