13 Archetypes: Listener - Wrong Answers Only!


I'm trying to make a blog post, that covers this entire series.

I would love to know techniques that people tried, that led no where, or worse(better!) led somewhere that seemed promising, but wasn't.

So please, reply with how you attempted to solve Listener, Wrong answers only.

Comments

  • This should get some good discussion, since it was likely one of the most controversial of the series.

    I delved far too far into positioning and music theory. and trying to come up with math differences between the notes and timings.

    That said, I really enjoyed it, it's a stark reminder to Keep It Simple Stupid especially on topics that could exclude people using prerequisite knowledge.

  • 0X00FF000X00FF00 ✭✭✭✭✭

    There were too many potential options to get an "alphabet" of 26 characters out of the vertical grid. And even after finally trying the "correct" one, it had some 4 possibilities for each, and no way to deduce you were even trying the right thing. Made worse by the sharp/flat letter shifting, obscuring the keyword.

    Oh the red herrings this one had. Including the overtly red letters that we didn't need to solve the puzzle.

  • starwortstarwort ✭✭✭✭✭

    Oh, so many wrong answers...

    I started out by writing the name of each note, its duration, the decorations, and its MIDI pitch number. The pitch numbers didn't seem to amount to much (tried interpreting them as ASCII values, or as ASCII values interpreted in hex after writing them in decimal. Moved on to looking at the differences between successive pitch values. Googled every known musical crypto system (see comment: https://community.ingress.com/en/discussion/comment/59398/#Comment_59398). Tried several variations on Solfa cipher (see comment: https://community.ingress.com/en/discussion/comment/59152/#Comment_59152). Tried, instead of MIDI pitch numbers using semitones, counting the position of each note on a scale starting at the lowest note (E2), and finding the difference between successive notes in that system. That was quite close to the real answer, but oh so far away.

  • starwortstarwort ✭✭✭✭✭

    topics that could exclude people using prerequisite knowledge

    As an aside, that hasn't been something that you could rely on throughout this series. I think everyone is familiar with Vigenère now, but doubtless many people weren't before this started. Conway stumped a whole lot of people for a long time; a lot of people didn't know how to spectrogram a sound clip, and you needed to know what a Kakuro puzzle was (although to be fair, I eventually successfully Googled it even without knowing its name - but I found several variations on the rules and it wasn't clear which variant this one was).

  • ToxoplasmollyToxoplasmolly ✭✭✭✭✭

    This challenge was obviously an instance of Solfa Cipher. Obviously.

    We need only to determine the correct “key” to use… and… the note values in the measures don’t add up, so maybe we need to be clever and keep counting 1-2-3-4 across the bars… and… I don’t know what to do with a 32nd note, so I’ll combine it with the following note and pretend they both have the same pitch… and… and… why am I not getting anywhere?

  • XJL310XJL310 ✭✭✭

    I was too confident that it had something to do with actual music, partly due to that I did a number of study on how famous musicians (like Bach, Chopin, Handel) used sheet music to cipher their hidden message, partly due to my identity as an amateur pianist/cellist/composer/MIDI maker...

    Started directly with MIDI sequence, try anything I can do with elements (pitch, durations, etc), switched between ASCII/Hex, and the wrongest move was treating E#=F and C#=Db, That ruined everything.

    Also tried plenty of music crypto stuff, mentioned by all agents above.


    BTW, I don't know if I was the only one who used some music theory and tried to "fill in the gap" in the sheet music to make it "harmonic".

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