Dorabella Cipher as Musical Inspiration

Bradley Hauer, Colin Choi, Abram Hindle, Scott Smallwood, Grzegorz Kondrak


Abstract
The Dorabella cipher is an encrypted note of English composer Edward Elgar, which has defied decipherment attempts for more than a century. While most proposed solutions are English texts, we investigate the hypothe- sis that Dorabella represents enciphered music. We weigh the evidence in favor of and against the hypothesis, devise a simplified music nota- tion, and attempt to reconstruct a melody from the cipher. Our tools are n-gram models of mu- sic which we validate on existing music cor- pora enciphered using monoalphabetic substi- tution. By applying our methods to Dorabella, we produce a decipherment with musical qual- ities, which is then transformed via artful com- position into a listenable melody. Far from ar- guing that the end result represents the only true solution, we instead frame the process of decipherment as part of the composition pro- cess.
Anthology ID:
2021.smp-1.5
Volume:
Proceedings of the Workshop on Speech and Music Processing 2021
Month:
December
Year:
2021
Address:
NIT Silchar, India
Editors:
Anupam Biswas, Rabul Hussain Laskar, Pinki Roy
Venue:
SMP
SIG:
Publisher:
NLP Association of India (NLPAI)
Note:
Pages:
33–38
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.smp-1.5
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Bradley Hauer, Colin Choi, Abram Hindle, Scott Smallwood, and Grzegorz Kondrak. 2021. Dorabella Cipher as Musical Inspiration. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Speech and Music Processing 2021, pages 33–38, NIT Silchar, India. NLP Association of India (NLPAI).
Cite (Informal):
Dorabella Cipher as Musical Inspiration (Hauer et al., SMP 2021)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.smp-1.5.pdf