Oh yes, Michael Haydn. I found that (quickly discounted by dint of not wanting a "ſ"or a "ß" to appear in the results).
Frustrated though that I couldn't find any online description of Messiaen's "communicable language" - apparently you have to buy a book to find out about that. I probably wasted a couple of hours going down all those dead ends...
Me too. I probably spent half an hour or more staring at that Kakuro wondering what to do with it before doing a search for numerical logic puzzles and happening to find a description and some rules for it, as well as the name Kakuro, on a big page of puzzle formats.
I am simply saying start at the middle, not the top or bottom. You are welcome to dm me ~ if such a thing is possible in these forums ~ or discord message me HemlokHex#4451 and I can provide some help to the dedicated.
I am not great at this **** ~ I am a newb decoder, but I have done all the challenges successfully, and I like seeing people succeed, so I am happy to help those who request a pointer in the right direction!
You are absolutely spot on. Tempo is irrelevant other than the rests showing you should be reading the opposing stave at those points. Accidentals modify in the same way as relates to notes, and the staves provide a counting method.
Start at middle c to zenith, nadir to midline. I think that's not too much info given it's been over 24hrs since release.
The most frustrating part of this is people saying "I got it in the first try" or "it's easy".
It's not easy. If it were easy, everyone would get it immediately. Maybe it seemed easy to you because you happened to guess right at each turn. That's not "easy", that's "lucky".
The second most frustrating part of this is the conflicting clues here. "top to bottom" vs "start at the middle". "don't force AR" vs "13AR is right there!". "the staves are together" vs "middle C is not middle C". Grrr.
The third most frustrating thing? Me posting gibberish and someone else commenting that it helped them solve the puzzle, especially when i now believe all that gibberish is completely incorrect.
I'm becoming disenchanted with these decode challenges. Pretty much they are all the same. There are N steps, and if you make the wrong guess at some intermediate step, you fall down a rabbit hole with no clue you're off in the weeds. This doesn't feel like decoding "skill", this feels like just plain dumb luck.
This doesn't feel like decoding "skill", this feels like just plain dumb luck.
And yet ... these puzzles could be used to help teach us how Niantic hides and encodes their passcodes. The more educated eyeballs we get, the quicker our teams will be in deciphering future challenges, ie. for Anomaly intel.
Kudos to the volunteered time taken out to design this 5th challenge, but as a fervent fan of Enoch Dalby, his music and my anticipation towards Listener Archetype, I must say I'm nothing but disappointed with the how this challenge was designed.
As someone of decent music background, almost everything became a red herring, even right up to the initial steps in "climbing the stairs".
Because it was so misaligned with the typical research that usually comes with deciphering, many times I was left wondering if I was on the right path, sinking into many different rabbit holes, lots of self-doubt, and wondering where to go. This was not the user journey I had for the last 4 challenges. Frustrations of the past were all happy and challenging frustrations, however with this one, it was not.
It is such a shame that the beautiful musical language wasn't utilized to the best of its abilities, and left me kind of feeling empty after knowing the solution to this week's challenge.
I usually never leave comments after I have solved each week, but I feel very compelled this week to do so with the waves of disappointment to the Archetype I was most looking forward to.
I shall just leave a small piece of advice, similar to what many have already said here. If you're still stuck trying to understand it, especially if you're still trying through any musical means, stop and go back to the drawing board. The only thing you ever need to know is to find a way to effectively map out alphabets (much has been shared about the method), and have a very basic understanding of accidentals.
Call me salty for all you want, but I hope this serves as a good feedback to the challenge designer.
Here’s my take on decoding, as I currently understand it: It is a process.
Come up with an idea.
Carry out the idea.
Decide whether the idea took you in a useful direction.
Repeat 1-3 until you have the solution.
Steps 1 and 3 require “skill”; breadth of knowledge, sheer creativity, ability to recognize patterns, etc. are all useful “skills” to have. Step 4 requires perseverance. Step 2 is a frustrating source of stupid errors (2+2 = 5) but otherwise more akin to busy work: I will feel cheated out of the puzzle if someone gives away too much of 1 or 3, but someone cannot do step 2 for me fast enough.
These challenges wouldn’t actually be challenges if they were simply the application of a standard grab bag of ciphers and online tools. So, I suppose another “skill” is being able to let go of pre-conceived notions of how something is supposed to work. It’s part of why my earlier advice, in another thread, was: Spend less time decoding the “hints” in the forums and more time decoding the actual challenge. The only universally useful hints I’ve seen take the form, “It is/is not <named encoding or cipher>,” and even then, you must trust that the speaker knows what they are talking about.
Intuition to sense when you have gone down the wrong path and abandon it may look like luck to some, but I think we are undervaluing that skill. Being able to quickly back track and get a rough sense for how to check yourself and avoid red flags is most definitely the MOST important decode skill of all of them! There is little else that isn't google-able at the end of the day.
It is a bit frustrating to have someone post something is easy for them when it is hard for me, but hey - makes it that much more fun to finally solve the thing :)
I will agree with others that the process is not a matter of skill.. it's just dumb luck. Sure, there's a process.. but as Nick Fury says..
"I recognize the council has made a decision, but given that it’s a stupid-**** decision, I’ve elected to ignore it."
Ignoring everything music related was the key to solving this. Even basic knowledge of how accidentals worked can mess you up.. As others have also mentioned.. they don't work the way they are supposed to.
There was a lot of potential in using musical notation as a cipher, but in the end, it was nothing more than a bunch of red herrings that would frustrate even the most amateur of musicians.
Unlike some others, brute forcing the known suffix was part of my process.. not being able to do that probably would have left me unable to solve this in a reasonable amount of time. That and honestly, the gibberish @GorillaSapiens posted actually helped a lot too.
I quite agree, especially with the last line. Heck, I still remember the days of Perplex City and I Love Bees; the puzzles in those games made for some interesting times, for sure.
So, they are not notes, the silences don't matter, the red notes don't matter, the missing beats don't matter, the durations don't matter, the green line doesn't matter (of course it's L2R). Other notations as clefs, bridges and instruments don't matter, only the accidentals, but they are not notes. This is not music at all.
And there is no standard enconding in this like Bach did: don't A-G.
I believe people who are saying it was "easy" most of the times mean it was "simple". Yes, the solution was too simple. The "musical" setting would allow for so, so much more elegant puzzles. In fact, the only "musical" necessity there were the alteration signs (or "accidentals" in English, if I'm not mistaken?). Otherwise the same could be just as well "encoded" with birds on treebranches. Also, in hindsight, the archetype should've been called "the Counter", having no relation to anything we could "listen to" for clues.
All in all, good job with muddying the waters with unnecessary information; that'll teach those pesky decoders to read too much into every dot and line! 😁
Notice that in the challenge there are notes outside the five lines and that your Haydn notation only has notes from the lower line to the top blank. Our challenge has 13 + 13 positions on the top and bottom pentagrams.
I do have telegram, Instagram, everything is under my ign. You are welcome to make a discord if you like to chat ~ we have a nice 200 agent discord community some friends and I manage, and of course, @BadWolf2014 huge passcode server!
1) read it as a duet after but treat the top and bottom staff as 2 separate entities
2) sharps and flats modify as pertains to music
Voila!
It is simple, but not easy. This was my longest solve time, but with hindsight the simplest puzzle, but the one with fewer clues as to getting a window into it to begin with. It was one of the more frustrating, especially compared to last week's where there was a definite pattern and way to respond to the puzzles.
I agree - it wasn't easy (and neither were the previous challenges). This one has probably been my least favourite challenge so far.
However, the gibberish you posted wasn't completely incorrect. Some of the letters were correct and quite a few others were only one off, if I remember correctly.
This puzzle was the exact opposite of fun. No challenge, nothing learned, no clear goal; Shortly said a waste of my time. Reading through the comments others have made I'm far from being the only person.
Compared to previous puzzles relying on encoding, this puzzle is based around obfuscation. Many decoys and red herrings serving no purpose other than attracting your attention.
It's not an easy puzzle, but it's based on luck. Luck on finding the pattern. The puzzle itself is very simplistic once you know how to look past the layers and layers of obfuscation.
Comments
Ya, kakkuro very fun to me..
Oh yes, Michael Haydn. I found that (quickly discounted by dint of not wanting a "ſ" or a "ß" to appear in the results).
Frustrated though that I couldn't find any online description of Messiaen's "communicable language" - apparently you have to buy a book to find out about that. I probably wasted a couple of hours going down all those dead ends...
I'd never even heard of it before the previous puzzle, but I found it quite the interesting mental exercise.
ya, I also heard it here, then learned it via Wikipedia then applied to the challenge. an interesting experience for me ... especially I get media
Me too. I probably spent half an hour or more staring at that Kakuro wondering what to do with it before doing a search for numerical logic puzzles and happening to find a description and some rules for it, as well as the name Kakuro, on a big page of puzzle formats.
I am simply saying start at the middle, not the top or bottom. You are welcome to dm me ~ if such a thing is possible in these forums ~ or discord message me HemlokHex#4451 and I can provide some help to the dedicated.
I am not great at this **** ~ I am a newb decoder, but I have done all the challenges successfully, and I like seeing people succeed, so I am happy to help those who request a pointer in the right direction!
You are absolutely spot on. Tempo is irrelevant other than the rests showing you should be reading the opposing stave at those points. Accidentals modify in the same way as relates to notes, and the staves provide a counting method.
Start at middle c to zenith, nadir to midline. I think that's not too much info given it's been over 24hrs since release.
I'm kind of surprised that nobody has posted a .mp3 of the nearly-unplayable music yet.
The most frustrating part of this is people saying "I got it in the first try" or "it's easy".
It's not easy. If it were easy, everyone would get it immediately. Maybe it seemed easy to you because you happened to guess right at each turn. That's not "easy", that's "lucky".
The second most frustrating part of this is the conflicting clues here. "top to bottom" vs "start at the middle". "don't force AR" vs "13AR is right there!". "the staves are together" vs "middle C is not middle C". Grrr.
The third most frustrating thing? Me posting gibberish and someone else commenting that it helped them solve the puzzle, especially when i now believe all that gibberish is completely incorrect.
I'm becoming disenchanted with these decode challenges. Pretty much they are all the same. There are N steps, and if you make the wrong guess at some intermediate step, you fall down a rabbit hole with no clue you're off in the weeds. This doesn't feel like decoding "skill", this feels like just plain dumb luck.
This doesn't feel like decoding "skill", this feels like just plain dumb luck.
And yet ... these puzzles could be used to help teach us how Niantic hides and encodes their passcodes. The more educated eyeballs we get, the quicker our teams will be in deciphering future challenges, ie. for Anomaly intel.
I guess there's more than tw ways to skin a cat.
Lol its playable. I could do it tomorrow! 🤣
Kudos to the volunteered time taken out to design this 5th challenge, but as a fervent fan of Enoch Dalby, his music and my anticipation towards Listener Archetype, I must say I'm nothing but disappointed with the how this challenge was designed.
As someone of decent music background, almost everything became a red herring, even right up to the initial steps in "climbing the stairs".
Because it was so misaligned with the typical research that usually comes with deciphering, many times I was left wondering if I was on the right path, sinking into many different rabbit holes, lots of self-doubt, and wondering where to go. This was not the user journey I had for the last 4 challenges. Frustrations of the past were all happy and challenging frustrations, however with this one, it was not.
It is such a shame that the beautiful musical language wasn't utilized to the best of its abilities, and left me kind of feeling empty after knowing the solution to this week's challenge.
I usually never leave comments after I have solved each week, but I feel very compelled this week to do so with the waves of disappointment to the Archetype I was most looking forward to.
I shall just leave a small piece of advice, similar to what many have already said here. If you're still stuck trying to understand it, especially if you're still trying through any musical means, stop and go back to the drawing board. The only thing you ever need to know is to find a way to effectively map out alphabets (much has been shared about the method), and have a very basic understanding of accidentals.
Call me salty for all you want, but I hope this serves as a good feedback to the challenge designer.
So true.
All the comments are relevant, depending upon the angle you look at. And
Start in the middle, go bottom to top can both be right at the same time.
Discord message me if you are frustrated. HemlokHex#4451
I actually did make an .mp3 of the melody
https://www.dropbox.com/s/f6dvh1jfphdwlt0/5.mp3?dl=0
Here’s my take on decoding, as I currently understand it: It is a process.
Steps 1 and 3 require “skill”; breadth of knowledge, sheer creativity, ability to recognize patterns, etc. are all useful “skills” to have. Step 4 requires perseverance. Step 2 is a frustrating source of stupid errors (2+2 = 5) but otherwise more akin to busy work: I will feel cheated out of the puzzle if someone gives away too much of 1 or 3, but someone cannot do step 2 for me fast enough.
These challenges wouldn’t actually be challenges if they were simply the application of a standard grab bag of ciphers and online tools. So, I suppose another “skill” is being able to let go of pre-conceived notions of how something is supposed to work. It’s part of why my earlier advice, in another thread, was: Spend less time decoding the “hints” in the forums and more time decoding the actual challenge. The only universally useful hints I’ve seen take the form, “It is/is not <named encoding or cipher>,” and even then, you must trust that the speaker knows what they are talking about.
I'm close, I think. I'm pretty sure I have the correct index, now; there may be some gaps that need filling in.
No te encuentro en discord
Intuition to sense when you have gone down the wrong path and abandon it may look like luck to some, but I think we are undervaluing that skill. Being able to quickly back track and get a rough sense for how to check yourself and avoid red flags is most definitely the MOST important decode skill of all of them! There is little else that isn't google-able at the end of the day.
It is a bit frustrating to have someone post something is easy for them when it is hard for me, but hey - makes it that much more fun to finally solve the thing :)
I will agree with others that the process is not a matter of skill.. it's just dumb luck. Sure, there's a process.. but as Nick Fury says..
"I recognize the council has made a decision, but given that it’s a stupid-**** decision, I’ve elected to ignore it."
Ignoring everything music related was the key to solving this. Even basic knowledge of how accidentals worked can mess you up.. As others have also mentioned.. they don't work the way they are supposed to.
There was a lot of potential in using musical notation as a cipher, but in the end, it was nothing more than a bunch of red herrings that would frustrate even the most amateur of musicians.
Unlike some others, brute forcing the known suffix was part of my process.. not being able to do that probably would have left me unable to solve this in a reasonable amount of time. That and honestly, the gibberish @GorillaSapiens posted actually helped a lot too.
I quite agree, especially with the last line. Heck, I still remember the days of Perplex City and I Love Bees; the puzzles in those games made for some interesting times, for sure.
Just to compile what everybody said.
So, they are not notes, the silences don't matter, the red notes don't matter, the missing beats don't matter, the durations don't matter, the green line doesn't matter (of course it's L2R). Other notations as clefs, bridges and instruments don't matter, only the accidentals, but they are not notes. This is not music at all.
And there is no standard enconding in this like Bach did: don't A-G.
Am I right?
I believe people who are saying it was "easy" most of the times mean it was "simple". Yes, the solution was too simple. The "musical" setting would allow for so, so much more elegant puzzles. In fact, the only "musical" necessity there were the alteration signs (or "accidentals" in English, if I'm not mistaken?). Otherwise the same could be just as well "encoded" with birds on treebranches. Also, in hindsight, the archetype should've been called "the Counter", having no relation to anything we could "listen to" for clues.
All in all, good job with muddying the waters with unnecessary information; that'll teach those pesky decoders to read too much into every dot and line! 😁
Notice that in the challenge there are notes outside the five lines and that your Haydn notation only has notes from the lower line to the top blank. Our challenge has 13 + 13 positions on the top and bottom pentagrams.
Yes and no.
There is a standard encoding, but it's not what you might think it is at first glance.
I do have telegram, Instagram, everything is under my ign. You are welcome to make a discord if you like to chat ~ we have a nice 200 agent discord community some friends and I manage, and of course, @BadWolf2014 huge passcode server!
Yes! A succinct summary.
Only 2 musical rules matter
1) read it as a duet after but treat the top and bottom staff as 2 separate entities
2) sharps and flats modify as pertains to music
Voila!
It is simple, but not easy. This was my longest solve time, but with hindsight the simplest puzzle, but the one with fewer clues as to getting a window into it to begin with. It was one of the more frustrating, especially compared to last week's where there was a definite pattern and way to respond to the puzzles.
I agree - it wasn't easy (and neither were the previous challenges). This one has probably been my least favourite challenge so far.
However, the gibberish you posted wasn't completely incorrect. Some of the letters were correct and quite a few others were only one off, if I remember correctly.
This puzzle was the exact opposite of fun. No challenge, nothing learned, no clear goal; Shortly said a waste of my time. Reading through the comments others have made I'm far from being the only person.
Compared to previous puzzles relying on encoding, this puzzle is based around obfuscation. Many decoys and red herrings serving no purpose other than attracting your attention.
It's not an easy puzzle, but it's based on luck. Luck on finding the pattern. The puzzle itself is very simplistic once you know how to look past the layers and layers of obfuscation.
good. now someone make a drum'n'bass / girlieband / autotune / ...[0] version of that mp3 and it will be in the charts forever ;-)
[0] these are just random words I remotely associate with music.
Thx!
That made it for me😃