Musical notes decode

Hi! I’m new to musical stuff and want help in decoding the following image. I’m having difficulty while doing this. Any kind of help will be greatly appreciated.

I don’t have a complete music image vocab/beastiary, but after the snowman on top of another snowman’s head, all I see is an armadillo, a horse, a hovering cheetah, a hovering eel, and a large column beyond which there’s another armadillo, a horse, a donkey (don’t worry; I can tell the difference) and a stopsign.

You catch the drift.

If you want, you can add sound effects from whatever instrument you like. I’d normally use a piano, but I’ll just puzzle out the notes after I’ve memorized the whole thing.

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Are you trying to memorize it? Or what do you mean by decode?

There is a hidden message in it. We need to decode this in alphabetic manner. It is just like cypher.

A puzzle? Is there any more context to it?

This is a challenge given to me. This is just like hiding information in some confusing format. These notes will reveal a secret message after when we decode it in alphabets.
*This is related to Cyber Security

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The notes are:

ABCEABD
ABDGABDFG
B
ABCgABCFG
B
ABD
ABDGABE
ABE
ABEGABED

Note the g is a different G to the Gs (not a typo).
No idea what you do with this but maybe the letters helps.

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A few questions:

  • Does the puzzle expect you to have any knowledge of music or music theory?
  • Does the puzzle expect you to use computer programming to solve it?
  • Is this homework for a computer science class or something like that?
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The reason I’m asking those questions is that if a teacher gave it to you and didn’t expect the students to know music theory, it narrows down the possible ways that information is encoded.

If the problem expects you to use computer programming to solve it, that’s also a useful clue.

I wrote a small program to scan it for words as if each measure represents a letter (there might be a double letter at measures 13-14), but no words in my dictionary matched the end.

If it’s for a class, the material that the teacher has covered up to this point should also provide some clues on where to start. If it’s a class called something like Advanced Cryptography, the places to look for solutions are probably going to be different than if it’s for a course called something like Intro to Java.

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Unlikely, but maybe it’s solresol.

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This is neither an assignment or a paper. My professor just added this at the end of slides and told us if you can figure out what this thing is. Further he told us only 1 student is able to crack this down in previous 8 years.
I have only clue that this is related to cryptography. I am studying stuff regarding musical notes for the first time in my life. I have tried some combinations but failed to extract meaningful information.
You can see below he only mentioned that what is this?

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I’m not sure what the solution is, but it might help to try to list every way that information could be encoded in the image.

There might be some clues in whatever the teacher has been covering in the class.

Here’s a diagram that shows how musical notation works. The music you posted only uses the white keys. You can use it to find the keyboard notes.


This is what it sounds like:

It looks like a great puzzle. I hope someone here can decode it. :slight_smile:

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I don’t have a lot of spare time which is what decryption requires. But I could give you a hint from what I see. (Cryptanalysis was a fun thing for me in college and then I became a Czech cryptanalyst in the Army.)

All the notes on the page are [almost] within the bounds of a solfège system.

image

This is a standard musical substitution cipher for the scale. It looks like it has possibilities.

Doug

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I missed the G below the solfège range in measure 7. So my strategy may not work but it certainly is [presented as] a musical cryptogram. This is a darn good puzzle.

@Jabran147, what is the language that you suspect the answer is in?

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This is dangerous. I love puzzles but don’t have the time for them. But I’m still thinking about this one.

Since the context is computer security the solution may include some hex encoding using A - F for 10 - 15. [ The Gs are an issue.]

Also there’s quite a few repeating blocks which help for clues. I highlighted what I thought was interesting.

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That looks like a good article. I also saw this one in a link on that page: Music cipher - Wikipedia

8/8 is an unusual way to write the time signature, and there are 16 measures. Normally it would be written 4/4, so there might be a clue there, or it might just be a mistake in the way it was written.

Your image stacks them like they are stacked in the music (9 on top of 7), but what if the weird 8/8 signature means to stack the measures 8 and 8 on top of each other or something like that? :thinking:

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Wait, can that be used for this?