Okay this one really has my head messed up. I tried breaking down both piano and keyboard lines into 1-26 started with bass clef and ending at the top of the treble clef. Not exactly sure if this is correct, but based off hints that’s what I started with. I also tried rearranging the 1-26 to try and adjust the alphabet associated with a1z26. I have yet to see a key word pop out to me. I’m also assuming the accidentals are changing the numbers as they would notes. I for some reason cannot see what I’m doing wrong and I feel like it is way easier than what I’ve made it out to be.
This is in the nature of decoding: the rabbit holes are often themselves interesting. You might end up learning how to encode Braille or conjugate Latin verbs even if it never gets you anywhere; it is a scientific endeavor in that way. Often you leave a lot of bricks in the yard when building your temple of knowledge.
The position of each note on the scale corresponds to one letter. When you view each position, it corresponds to a respective letter.
You have to draw the scale of "do,re, mi, fa, sol, la, si, do, re, mi, fa..". and match to "a, b, c, d, e, f..." then transcribe the drawing of the challenge for each matching letter.
Z and A are the same note in the middle. but make sure you don't swap the top line letters with the bottom line letters.
That last line... son of a.... If I'd seen it last night I could have solved it last night. I faked myself out for four friggin hours
Also, I do not know the "correct" method for extracting the known suffix from the last section, even though I got a working code simply by jamming something in, in a fit of pique.
I was yet another person thinking too hard about this puzzle; its definitely the easiest simplest of the lot so far, but it was the one that took me the longest to figure out. Its the only one i felt like i had no starting direction with. Hit me up on telegram if you need help, but note: i expect you to show your work :D
Everyone that says once it clicks its over is 100% correct. You really cant give another hint on this puzzle that doesnt immediately make the solution obvious. Keyword is SUPER apropos!
Indeed, once the keyword clicked - actually only part in one attempt - but found a transcription error - then had keyword and suffix and found another transcription error in the prefix... it does come quick once it clicks.... even if you do keep making transcription errors.
Yay! Ace! That's awesome. I lost sleep the first night - drove me nuts but I had to rest.... worst solve time so far.... ugh.
To all those who hit me up on Discord ~ lovely to meet agents from all over the world, many of whom had a solve by the time I was awake!
Fabulous that communities are forming and friends being made due to this comp transcending geographical boundaries - the best part of ingress, I imho.
As to this being more 'luck', I disagree. It took tenaciousness and testing a known cipher method in new permutations to get a result. Once you were on the right track, the keyword leaped out at you.
Cleverly it made it harder for real musicians. Knowledge of the subject definitely held me up (gawd ~I tried counting intervals, thirds, fifths, keys) but all that did make me realise it was using musical format to encode, and look past the music.
Congratulations to all who solved it thus far ~ keep at it if you haven't.
Even after not touching a trumpet or trombone from my ska days 15 years ago, whatever music knowledge I had led me down a dark, dark path. Was very frustrated with this one but everything you need is in this thread.
Nothing musical about it, I was hoping it was a Solfa Cipher or something. Not my favorite but interesting to throw a puzzle in this series that's basically, "don't overthink!"
I'm kind of offended by people calling this luck. Yes it has a decent amount of herrings, and low on hints.
It requires more then zero music knowledge, but not much more.
It's clearly very accessible compared to puzzles that used levdistance, obscure foreign puzzles with errors, audio stegnography, or visual stegnography. (Music basics exist in all cutures as far as I'm aware, contains no comp-sci or ingress specific cyphers, and is easily solved on mobile / pen and paper)
So a minimum of music knowledge, + some intuition, using known cyphers used previously this series, looking for a known suffix, and a smattering of visual crypt-analysis.
I feel like anyone calling it luck, is either
missing the (small) amount of pre-requisite music knowledge, (which is easily picked up)
Missing skills at crypt-analysis, intuition, or just looking at the problem on paper / visually.
Or have too much musical knowledge and are chasing specialties.
Are blindly googling "Music Code" and applying that knowledge.
It's similar to the skills needed to 'spot' a barcode in an image.
Spot a pattern in the noise, to create the right order of mp3 files.
Spotting a non-obvious pattern in words.
Recognize an unlabelled Kukaro puzzle, without googling the name you don't have.
Just because you didn't solve it, overshot the answer by going too in depth, doesn't mean this hasn't been the literal simplest puzzle in the series, (given previous solves, and difficulty of knowing pre-requisite knowledge).
Edit: To anyone disagreeing, reply with why, At least I posted a reasoned response as to why I consider it easy.
The cleves are there and you have to explicitly ignore how they work in detail to solve this puzzle (but still apply the knowledge what clefs do in general to know that you need to decode the two lines with two different "keys")
I disagree with your point about this being as obvious as the previous puzzles. To me, all of the previous ones were either obvious or you just do the natural thing to do with it. Maybe this is a bit biased, since I'm working in CS and pretty much knew all of the concepts. I am not new to this decoding stuff and I did decode a lot of the original Ingress daily 'challenges'. This one reminded me a lot of another really old one, where I was simply not able to spot the 'obvious' braille code.
I do not call it luck entirely, but I think it takes a lucky guess to solve this one.
If you solved a lot of puzzles, you kind of know what to look for (ignoring the fact, that we know the suffix, because you normaly wouldn't). Patterns, number, clues... This is usually the first thing I do in these.
Sometimes the hints are subtle or 1-2 steps away from the 'real' hint. Like when you skipped to the bottom right hint on the words puzzle from 13AR. This puzzle here was a real deal for me, because:
If you use music notes, there are a lot of C and E in the resulting string. Which is usually a good path, since they can result in numbers/letters respectively. However, there would be too few.
The red/green 'hints' on the picture did at one point lead me to 'blind' as a hint. Thinking that there is some way to transcribe all of it into braille.
Then there was a similar puzzle where in the end, a break was a simple '-' whereas a note was '.' (you probably know what this is)
I left out the attempts I probably shouldn't have done, as the one obvious thing did kind of tell me not to. But to me, using a bit of imagination of what could be and what would I do, usually helps finding new possibilities to encode/decode somthing.
My grit with this puzzle is that I have so far spotted no hint on what to do, but it has so many possibilities of what it could be. Maybe the hint is that there is none, therefore it must be simple. But to me, the solution I got in the end, I consider it a 'lucky guess' instead of a path following hints.
By the way, I am interested if there is an actual hint or someone considers something in the picture a hint to the solution.
What really made me stuck was also the fact of knowing to much about music. Even already trying to ignore it as much as possible, I didn't see or understand the first hint from @zi0f4t
Everybody was saying that we only should care about the accidents, But to make this clear: It's just like @zi0f4t said... they don't work as expected in music. In general... forget about halftone at all. They only exist in real music.
But 'keyboard' and 'piano' are basically the same thing, and (almost) whatever keyboard you have, it will have a middle C that plays at ~262Hz, same as the piano does. Now if one were 'clarinet', middle C would be a different note (but maybe that would be even more misleading to decoders who are also musicians).
I plan on writing a blog series for the whole lot at some point. So would be happy to collate and collect all the clues I may have missed in this and previous puzzles.
I can definitely see peoples issues with diving too deep. I'd even say that the 'difficultly' drop of the puzzle in itself was deceiving after the previous puzzles we have had.
One method I had of decoding this one left me with "Ah 2 Mny Ha" which I didn't know if it was a hint, a troll, or both.
I think (with hindsight) that this puzzle would have benefited on having the treble clef on the bottom, and bass clef on the top. It would have confused muso's enough to probably get to the right solution faster.
Comments
some hints:
ABC... = do, re, mi... (in sol)
NOP... = do, re, mi... (in fa)
the piano and keyboard lines are played at the same time, considering b(flat) and #(sharp) efects.
it's only looks like a music, but it's not a music...
Okay this one really has my head messed up. I tried breaking down both piano and keyboard lines into 1-26 started with bass clef and ending at the top of the treble clef. Not exactly sure if this is correct, but based off hints that’s what I started with. I also tried rearranging the 1-26 to try and adjust the alphabet associated with a1z26. I have yet to see a key word pop out to me. I’m also assuming the accidentals are changing the numbers as they would notes. I for some reason cannot see what I’m doing wrong and I feel like it is way easier than what I’ve made it out to be.
This is in the nature of decoding: the rabbit holes are often themselves interesting. You might end up learning how to encode Braille or conjugate Latin verbs even if it never gets you anywhere; it is a scientific endeavor in that way. Often you leave a lot of bricks in the yard when building your temple of knowledge.
The position of each note on the scale corresponds to one letter. When you view each position, it corresponds to a respective letter.
You have to draw the scale of "do,re, mi, fa, sol, la, si, do, re, mi, fa..". and match to "a, b, c, d, e, f..." then transcribe the drawing of the challenge for each matching letter.
Z and A are the same note in the middle. but make sure you don't swap the top line letters with the bottom line letters.
If it helps, use this image:
https://tinyurl.com/ygjvalmm
sorry XD
It helps for me.
You may want to tinyurl that link; the forum's word filter breaks it.
It's not 1-26. It is two sets of 1-13.
That last line... son of a.... If I'd seen it last night I could have solved it last night. I faked myself out for four friggin hours
Also, I do not know the "correct" method for extracting the known suffix from the last section, even though I got a working code simply by jamming something in, in a fit of pique.
Well put @Toxoplasmolly . And great advice.
I was yet another person thinking too hard about this puzzle; its definitely the
easiestsimplest of the lot so far, but it was the one that took me the longest to figure out. Its the only one i felt like i had no starting direction with. Hit me up on telegram if you need help, but note: i expect you to show your work :DEveryone that says once it clicks its over is 100% correct. You really cant give another hint on this puzzle that doesnt immediately make the solution obvious. Keyword is SUPER apropos!
Indeed, once the keyword clicked - actually only part in one attempt - but found a transcription error - then had keyword and suffix and found another transcription error in the prefix... it does come quick once it clicks.... even if you do keep making transcription errors.
Good keyword
Have you managed to solve the puzzle yet? @IGindoI @Zorgul @Keyhole7 @KarM3L @iIluminatus88 @1Z4N4G1 @Klingew
If you need any help, you can Telegram me @teresakh.
Thks for this, it helped me a lot!!! Now I can finally get some sleep... :-)
Thoughtful of you to reach out! I have not yet.
@AndreagoEc1 @Ranglaren
Yay! Ace! That's awesome. I lost sleep the first night - drove me nuts but I had to rest.... worst solve time so far.... ugh.
To all those who hit me up on Discord ~ lovely to meet agents from all over the world, many of whom had a solve by the time I was awake!
Fabulous that communities are forming and friends being made due to this comp transcending geographical boundaries - the best part of ingress, I imho.
As to this being more 'luck', I disagree. It took tenaciousness and testing a known cipher method in new permutations to get a result. Once you were on the right track, the keyword leaped out at you.
Cleverly it made it harder for real musicians. Knowledge of the subject definitely held me up (gawd ~I tried counting intervals, thirds, fifths, keys) but all that did make me realise it was using musical format to encode, and look past the music.
Congratulations to all who solved it thus far ~ keep at it if you haven't.
Solving is its own reward.
@Keyhole7 you were very close! Don't give up!
Even after not touching a trumpet or trombone from my ska days 15 years ago, whatever music knowledge I had led me down a dark, dark path. Was very frustrated with this one but everything you need is in this thread.
Nothing musical about it, I was hoping it was a Solfa Cipher or something. Not my favorite but interesting to throw a puzzle in this series that's basically, "don't overthink!"
I ended up solving it by working out the last letter logically...just like you would in a kakuro puzzle.
Then @quattro 's 1st clue on page 2 made perfect sense to me and it was quick to solve from there.
It's a long way from the bottom to the top?
Nah...going from the bottom to the top is alot closer than you think.
I'm kind of offended by people calling this luck. Yes it has a decent amount of herrings, and low on hints.
It requires more then zero music knowledge, but not much more.
It's clearly very accessible compared to puzzles that used levdistance, obscure foreign puzzles with errors, audio stegnography, or visual stegnography. (Music basics exist in all cutures as far as I'm aware, contains no comp-sci or ingress specific cyphers, and is easily solved on mobile / pen and paper)
So a minimum of music knowledge, + some intuition, using known cyphers used previously this series, looking for a known suffix, and a smattering of visual crypt-analysis.
I feel like anyone calling it luck, is either
It's similar to the skills needed to 'spot' a barcode in an image.
Spot a pattern in the noise, to create the right order of mp3 files.
Spotting a non-obvious pattern in words.
Recognize an unlabelled Kukaro puzzle, without googling the name you don't have.
Just because you didn't solve it, overshot the answer by going too in depth, doesn't mean this hasn't been the literal simplest puzzle in the series, (given previous solves, and difficulty of knowing pre-requisite knowledge).
Edit: To anyone disagreeing, reply with why, At least I posted a reasoned response as to why I consider it easy.
It's a long way to the top because the top isn't where it would be if this were an actual score.
Why would they be the same even in music. That's a big assumption considering this is a duet played on 2 instruments.
Lol...I was using it to be more cryptic with my clue...but yes...it is both a long way and close according to your pov.
Middle c is always the same note in music no matter wwhich instrument plays it.
That may be true in terms of theory / tone. But think about it logically and physically.
You are pressing 2 different keys, on 2 different devices.
The Keyboard and Piano hints are literally there to guide you away from thinking they share a note, for those digging too deep.
They have no other purpose.
The cleves are there and you have to explicitly ignore how they work in detail to solve this puzzle (but still apply the knowledge what clefs do in general to know that you need to decode the two lines with two different "keys")
tired...
I disagree with your point about this being as obvious as the previous puzzles. To me, all of the previous ones were either obvious or you just do the natural thing to do with it. Maybe this is a bit biased, since I'm working in CS and pretty much knew all of the concepts. I am not new to this decoding stuff and I did decode a lot of the original Ingress daily 'challenges'. This one reminded me a lot of another really old one, where I was simply not able to spot the 'obvious' braille code.
I do not call it luck entirely, but I think it takes a lucky guess to solve this one.
If you solved a lot of puzzles, you kind of know what to look for (ignoring the fact, that we know the suffix, because you normaly wouldn't). Patterns, number, clues... This is usually the first thing I do in these.
Sometimes the hints are subtle or 1-2 steps away from the 'real' hint. Like when you skipped to the bottom right hint on the words puzzle from 13AR. This puzzle here was a real deal for me, because:
I left out the attempts I probably shouldn't have done, as the one obvious thing did kind of tell me not to. But to me, using a bit of imagination of what could be and what would I do, usually helps finding new possibilities to encode/decode somthing.
My grit with this puzzle is that I have so far spotted no hint on what to do, but it has so many possibilities of what it could be. Maybe the hint is that there is none, therefore it must be simple. But to me, the solution I got in the end, I consider it a 'lucky guess' instead of a path following hints.
By the way, I am interested if there is an actual hint or someone considers something in the picture a hint to the solution.
What really made me stuck was also the fact of knowing to much about music. Even already trying to ignore it as much as possible, I didn't see or understand the first hint from @zi0f4t
Everybody was saying that we only should care about the accidents, But to make this clear: It's just like @zi0f4t said... they don't work as expected in music. In general... forget about halftone at all. They only exist in real music.
But 'keyboard' and 'piano' are basically the same thing, and (almost) whatever keyboard you have, it will have a middle C that plays at ~262Hz, same as the piano does. Now if one were 'clarinet', middle C would be a different note (but maybe that would be even more misleading to decoders who are also musicians).
I plan on writing a blog series for the whole lot at some point. So would be happy to collate and collect all the clues I may have missed in this and previous puzzles.
I can definitely see peoples issues with diving too deep. I'd even say that the 'difficultly' drop of the puzzle in itself was deceiving after the previous puzzles we have had.
One method I had of decoding this one left me with "Ah 2 Mny Ha" which I didn't know if it was a hint, a troll, or both.
I think (with hindsight) that this puzzle would have benefited on having the treble clef on the bottom, and bass clef on the top. It would have confused muso's enough to probably get to the right solution faster.
Finally.
Think about # and b