[HN Gopher] Enigma Variations
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       Enigma Variations
        
       Author : tintinnabula
       Score  : 43 points
       Date   : 2022-11-04 21:52 UTC (3 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
        
       | bell-cot wrote:
       | And here I expected
       | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enigma_machine#Models
        
       | HKH2 wrote:
       | The first part was sampled in Rob Dougan's Clubbed to Death.
        
       | motohagiography wrote:
       | 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 wrote:
         | TIL about Aphex Twin's Windowlicker face spectrogram....
         | 
         | https://www.wired.com/2002/05/hey-whos-that-face-in-my-song/
        
       | nsedlet wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | silvester23 wrote:
         | 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...
        
         | globular-toast wrote:
         | 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 wrote:
           | 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 wrote:
           | 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.
        
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       (page generated 2022-11-07 23:02 UTC)