Dorabella Cipher as Musical Inspiration
Fuente:
arXiv
Guardado en:
| Autores principales: | , , , , |
|---|---|
| Formato: | Preprint |
| Publicado: |
2025
|
| Materias: | |
| Acceso en línea: | |
| Etiquetas: |
Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
|
| _version_ | 1866914051164995584 |
|---|---|
| author | Hauer, Bradley Choi, Colin Hindle, Abram Smallwood, Scott Kondrak, Grzegorz |
| author_facet | Hauer, Bradley Choi, Colin Hindle, Abram Smallwood, Scott Kondrak, Grzegorz |
| contents | The Dorabella cipher is an encrypted note written by English composer Edward Elgar, which has defied decipherment attempts for more than a century. While most proposed solutions are English texts, we investigate the hypothesis that Dorabella represents enciphered music. We weigh the evidence for and against the hypothesis, devise a simplified music notation, and attempt to reconstruct a melody from the cipher. Our tools are n-gram models of music which we validate on existing music corpora enciphered using monoalphabetic substitution. By applying our methods to Dorabella, we produce a decipherment with musical qualities, which is then transformed via artful composition into a listenable melody. Far from arguing that the end result represents the only true solution, we instead frame the process of decipherment as part of the composition process. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_17950 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Dorabella Cipher as Musical Inspiration Hauer, Bradley Choi, Colin Hindle, Abram Smallwood, Scott Kondrak, Grzegorz Computation and Language The Dorabella cipher is an encrypted note written by English composer Edward Elgar, which has defied decipherment attempts for more than a century. While most proposed solutions are English texts, we investigate the hypothesis that Dorabella represents enciphered music. We weigh the evidence for and against the hypothesis, devise a simplified music notation, and attempt to reconstruct a melody from the cipher. Our tools are n-gram models of music which we validate on existing music corpora enciphered using monoalphabetic substitution. By applying our methods to Dorabella, we produce a decipherment with musical qualities, which is then transformed via artful composition into a listenable melody. Far from arguing that the end result represents the only true solution, we instead frame the process of decipherment as part of the composition process. |
| title | Dorabella Cipher as Musical Inspiration |
| topic | Computation and Language |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.17950 |