Enigma Variations

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

by tintinnabula • 4 years ago

45 10 4 years ago

en.wikipedia.org

HKH2• 4 years ago

The first part was sampled in Rob Dougan's Clubbed to Death.

While I haven't attempted Elgar's work, some few years ago I started running down the rabbit hole of musical cryptograms. The main reason I wasn't interested in Elgar or alleged Bach cryptograms was I suspected artists before the 20th century were too given to allegory and coincidence that was more like a crossword with contextual clues than an actual cryptogram.

One I spent a bit of time on was Max Richter's cipher from his album Infra which uses a morse code shorthand that I wasn't able to recover, but it appeared to contain something like a PO box address at one point. I don't have an ear for morse, so I relied on using audacity to isolate the track and then variations of automatic analysis to yield something. The challenge with artistic ciphers is they can be impressionistic. There appeared to be a time lapse of images from 9/11 in the spectrogram of the Infra pieces, and a winding path that I thought might have been a bus route along the Thames from 7/7, but again because it's impressionistic, it's really hard to verify, and I can't imagine him letting on if someone got it right anyway. The morse seems like the only verifiable part.

Aphex Twin's famous "face" spectrogram is just the most famous example of a whole bunch of puzzles produced by artists in that genre under various aliases and pseudonyms. The project "Gescom" (which claims members of groups like Future Sound of London, who Richter also once collaborated with) made what are kind of etudes for electronic music production, where with a tool like Audacity or ffmpeg, you can reverse and unfold some of the samples to yield their original form, and in doing so, you can hear how the glitches and industrial sounds are made.

Maybe there is some future project where we can use ML and some kind of conditional entropy filter on the tracks in these songs (and perhaps even Elgar's variations) to do feature extraction and identify artifacts of intent from noise, and then potentially unfold what these artists folded into their work. I've also been working on something similar with Arvo Part's work, which is also alleged to be procedural, and have had a bit more success with it, and there are others who have written about it but again, difficult to verify. Fascinating topic.

__coaxialcabal• 4 years ago

TIL about Aphex Twin's Windowlicker face spectrogram....

https://www.wired.com/2002/05/hey-whos-that-face-in-my-song/

seanhunter• 4 years ago

Some more fun examples to explore:

1. In the UK there was a TV detective series called "Inspector Morse". The composer of the theme music (Barrington PHeloung) included "Morse" in morse code in the theme. They then decided to start including clues in morse in the theme music behind episodes including red herrings so if you decoded the clue it might send you down the wrong avenue[1]

2. There are a number of cryptograms in the music of Alban Berg, including several suspected but which have never definitively been solved. An example which is like a crossword as you have put it would be in the violin concerto the choice of the famous corale and the way in which the text of the Bach cantata with the same corale ("Blessed are those who die in the Lord") refers to the dead child (Manon Gropius) the concerto was dedicated to. Getting that particular example to work is an amazing feat of musical architecture because the violin concerto is a serialist piece so he had to include the right part of the corale into the tone series for the piece in order to make it work[2]. It's also just an incredible piece of music in general

[1] https://www.classicfm.com/discover-music/periods-genres/film... [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20171107012243/https://www.laphi...

nsedlet• 4 years ago

The score for Dunkirk includes a piece by Hans Zimmer that adapts one of the Enigma Variations: https://open.spotify.com/track/5eeBoptaR9wfFe5csGjIMP?si=3b5...

One of the most beautiful uses of music in a movie in recent memory, IMO.

globular-toast• 4 years ago

There's something special about Nimrod that really resonates with British people. I always found use of it in films to be a rather cheap shot, but I suppose in Dunkirk it is just on the right side of tasteful.

elcapitan• 4 years ago

I guess it hits extra hard in Dunkirk because of the ominous soundtrack that you're exposed through all the rest of the movie. Then with the plane safely landing in the end, the arrival of the trains full of soldiers, Churchill's speech and Nimrod placed over it, all that tension gets resolved at once in a beautiful way.

symfoniq• 4 years ago

Not just British people. This American heard it (along with the rest of the variations) performed on my first date with my wife. It will always be a favorite.

silvester23• 4 years ago

Just a note: According to Wikipedia and Spotify, that track ("Variation 15") was written by Benjamin Wallfisch [0], not by Zimmer.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Wallfisch#As_composer...

bell-cot• 4 years ago

And here I expected https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enigma_machine#Models

Enigma Variations

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