Enigma Variations

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.

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.

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

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