Fez soundtrack contains hidden data | Hacker News Reader

Fez soundtrack contains hidden data

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78 points11031a15 comments

It's become somewhat of a tradition among electronic musicians to embed graphics into spectrograms, the most widely known example being Aphex Twin's "Windowlicker" (1999). A few examples, including that one:

http://www.bastwood.com/?page_id=10

There must be precursors of the practice before the advent of computer music, or even digital/electronic music production altogether, but I can't recall any; I'd love to be pointed to them.

It's not quite on the level of embedding images in a spectrogram, but buried deep in Amarok by Mike Oldfield is morse code for "FUCK OFF RB", a reference to Richard Branson, owner of his label, Virgin Records.

Oh, absolutely. Earliest one I'm aware of is Bach's "Art of the fugue", where he embedded his name as a third voice.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BACH_motif

It is pretty easy to accomplish too. Here is a perl program an explanation on how to encode images on sounds.

http://www.ohmpie.com/imageencode/

for some bizarre reason, i was interviewed about this. in 2002.

http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2002/05/52426

The game itself also has some crazy puzzles: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2012/04/why-it-took-almos...

"The QR code returns a string of dates:

    1955 1958 1960 1961 1967 1969 1971 1977 2003 2005

Which might mean something, or it might just be the birth dates of the development team, I’m really not sure yet."

57 year olds working alongside 7 year olds. Nice to know they don't discriminate based on age.

I would guess that the >2000 ones are propably birth dates of some of the developer's children

Edit : someone asked this question on stackexchange : http://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/63374/what-does-th...

As far as I know the only developer on the core team with a kid is Adam Saltsman, and his kid was born in 2011. I think all of the team members are young enough that they would have been teen parents (12-16) if they had kids born in 2003 or 2005 :).

The musician, @disasterpeace, is a bit of a mad genius. Just play his game if you require proof: http://colorcave.com/

This one on the left looks like the center includes three channels of something- whether it is audio or not, I can't tell, but these should be isolated to look at in more detail: http://www.geek.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Adobe-Soundbo...

The bit to the right looks a little like a set of DNA sequences, but I bet it isn't.

I saw "Indie Game The Movie" last night (http://www.indiegamethemovie.com/). They followed the ups and downs of developing fez and super meat boy (and some braid).

If you're racing to develop something before you run out of money, take a break and go see this movie. You'll love it.

First off, how did the person who found this come about this? They must have been tipped off.

Second, this could be (is?) a great way to covertly transmit information. Wow!

Finally, where are the patents on this? :)

Some audio players have a spectrogram visualisation, iirc Winamp has one included by default.

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