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Hidden Music Claimed In Da Vinci Painting
snib sends us to CNN for coverage of an Italian musician and computer technician who claims to have uncovered a hidden musical score in Leonardo Da Vinci's "Last Supper." Giovanni Maria Pala published this and other findings about the 'Last Supper' painting in his book The Hidden Music, released in Italy Friday. "[This raises] the possibility that the Renaissance genius might have left behind a somber composition to accompany the scene depicted in the 15th-century wall painting. 'It sounds like a requiem,' Giovanni Maria Pala said. 'It's like a soundtrack that emphasizes the passion of Jesus.'"
I'm sure if you look hard enough, you can find anything you want in that painting. Anyways, RMS wants this story to be called HIDDEN MUSIC CLAIMED IN GNU/LAST SUPPER.
This has to be one of the most creative promotional stunts ever. It's difficult enough to get anyone to listen to new music, but tying your piece to the last supper is truly a work of genius.
So quick to dismiss this? I understand that most of you probably have no particular religious beliefs, or none at all, but what's to say that DaVinci wasn't the kind of man to try to disguise something inside one of his paintings? I still like to think it takes a truly open mind to discover the places technology can truly take us.
"Slapping lipstick on a pig does NOT make it Natalie Portman. Paris Hilton, maybe, but not Portman." - UncleTogie
Da Vinci accidentally misplaced his car keys in the painting too, but died before he could find it.
True story.
So if I were to take a photo of this painting is the RIAA going to want royalties?
-FataL
with the 6oats3 picture see what comes out of there. (heh heh)
.. the story sounds remarkably similar to this one:
;)
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/01/2047212
I have two comments:
1) I guess people can interpret music in anything and get some recognition from it.
2) If there really isn't music intentionally hidden in these works I bet the artists wouldn't be too happy having people alleging that there is, and changing the interpretation of the piece. Honestly, if the artist had some reason to hide a message in a painting, perhaps because of the potential consequences of his speech, wouldn't he do it in a form where the message was intelligible later? Music seems a poor choice, and there really isn't any motive I can easily think of why you'd have to hide a musical score from view. After all, it's not like the RIAA was filing lawsuits back then
I remember that Sim Earth had the ability to play your planet's current statistics as a song, more like a series of notes based on the content of the Y axis. I bet it the hidden song in the painting would be just as nonsensical and unmusical as playing a scatter plot as if it were music.
The RIAA has launched a lawsuit against the Santa Maria delle Grazie for copyright infringement...
Encryption is changing data; stenography is hiding it.
If you go around determined to see the virgin Mary's face, you'll start seeing something kind of like it in every tree bark, every mildew, every piece of burned toast, every birthmark.
If you're determined to find hidden messages and keep trying different numerical values, you can pull spooky phrases out of the bible... or indeed the script for Animal House.
People have long been "composing" music from random number generators and fractals. If a random number generator can be forced in to a musical composition, by definition, any series of values can be.
I personally enjoy the following algorhythm: Break the image up in to inch squares. For any given inch if the dominant color is red, note the word "this", if it's green, note the word "is", and if it's blue, note the word "stupid". Amazingly, Da Vinci left a message encoded that appears to describe his views on musical analysis of his work.
nuf sed
Table-ized A.I.
We know that modern creators often include Easter Eggs in their products, everything from hidden bits of programming to images etched into the silicone hardware. Why do so many of slashdot readers find it impossible to accept that Leonardo might have done the same in his work?
We know he had the skill for it, we know he did it in other works, we know he loved tricks.
Yes, human beings have got a talent for seeing patterns where there aren't any, and slashdot readers got a talent for being a bunch of smartasses who think they know better.
Personally I would first want to see a picture of the painting, the overlayed musical score (how lenient do you have to be to see the scores, is it ALWAYS the center of the hand or is the note sometimes put at the fingernails and othertimes at the wrist?) and the music itself.
I am slightly suspicious because it seems all the be explained in a book. MONEY GRABBER! If it was science it would be a in a peer reviewed paper, not in a commercial book. Then their is the claim that this shows Leonardo was a religious person. Eh why? I don't see the connection between hiding a piece of music in a painting and the painters world vision.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
If you're going to hide something, use truecrypt.
If we study more closely, we might find his tax returns as well.
If there really isn't music intentionally hidden in these works I bet the artists wouldn't be too happy having people alleging that there is, and changing the interpretation of the piece. Honestly, if the artist had some reason to hide a message in a painting, perhaps because of the potential consequences of his speech, wouldn't he do it in a form where the message was intelligible later? Music seems a poor choice, and there really isn't any motive I can easily think of why you'd have to hide a musical score from view.
While I agree that it's way to easy to claim hidden messages that were never there in the first place, it's wrong to say that, in case there is a message, the artist was trying - and deeded - to conceal it. People, especially those with bright minds like Leonardo, have been and still are doing this kind of thing for fun and "just because they can" (I know I have done similar things a few times myself, and I'm not a Da Vinci). On top of that, in Leonardo's days there really was a lot more to art than throwing a few buckets of paint against a wall. Weaving in multiple symbolisms that only the initiated would read was "basic painting skill number two" (the actual painting techniques being number one).
So the message is not hidden as in "concealed because it needed to be", but hidden as in "non-obvious and thus likely forgotten/lost until rediscovered".
Linux user since early January 1992.
They've already released the video for it!
...and makes absolutely no sense. You can't just find notes and say you have a piece of music, because music is more than notes. Assuming this is anything like written music as we know it, which it looks like from the picture, he's missing an awful lot of information. What key is it? What's the time signature? There's no reference point anywhere on there from which to play, and that doesn't even touch on note durations or other playing instructions. "The tempo was almost painfully slow" - how the hell did he figure out how fast he's supposed to play it?
I know people are kind of enamored with the idea of Da Vinci hiding a bunch of stuff in his works, but come on. At best this guy is completely deluded and is grasping at straws to piece together something he actually thinks is encoded in the painting, kind of like those nuts who rearrange letters in Bible passages to make predictions. At worst he's making it all up and wants to siphon off some attention from the Da Vinci Code.
"I'm not much interested in interoperability. I want substitutability. I want to be able to throw your software out."
Who'd have thought that you could find order in a picture showing order and transform that order into something resembling music? Mind boggling. For an encore this bozo should be searching for bible codes in Slashdot.
is when this track is coming out for Guitar Hero: III on Xbox 360. Also, will it include an achievement? How many Microsoft points will this cost? Seeing as it is Jesus, shouldn't this be a free download?
I look forward to giving this track a run through on my plastic guitar.
[http://it-tastes-so-good.blogspot.com] Are you hungry?
Or some sample, surely this is out of copyright by now?
Maybe one day they realise that it plays a scary piece of music when the painting is put in a gramophone.
Seriously, these people think of everything!
A 40-seconds long musical score is a bit short for a "serious" piece of music. Perhaps it was an advertising jingle instead. I'm guessing the lyrics to go with the music were "Giovanni's pizza are tasty. The extra-large size is so big it's the last supper you will ever need to buy. Tell them Da Vinci sent you to qualify for the 'buy one, get one free' offer."
We're advised and told to be nice and to "promote" rather than "discourage" posts. . . this thread is making this duty especially difficult. . .
I remember a Matlab demo we did in one of my ECE courses. We took the fourier transform of an image of Batman--I think it was an FFT--and after some other processing played it as a wav file. Pretty awesome song, actually.
Although, to be fair, the image was made for the demo. Still, it was a fair likeness of Batman considering.
Mormons don't use ASCII. Or Pi for that matter. Mormons got Unicode on the continent before it was invented - they found it on buried golden plates, and they gave them back.
Yet there were other abstract things hidden in that work of art, I can think of a respect for the Golden Ratio and an implied dodecahedron, but I'm sure there were others. A work of a master craftsman like Da Vinci shouldn't have Occams Razor applied, for it is not simplistic in nature but harbours deeper meaning.
Anyone else notice you have to play this picture music backwards. This may be the first ever use of backmasking, a tool often used to hide evil messages in music.
Intriguing!
You moved your mouse. Please restart Windows for changes to take effect.
Don't dismiss this so quickly as 'another pr stunt'.. DaVinci was a genius and it wouldn't surprise me if it turns out this really is his music. Then again, it won't really surprise me if this is just one extravagant ad either.. We'll just have to wait and see whether this is authentic or a hoax.
Such a simple pattern can be gotten from like anywhere. That's not a song at all.
The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne
I seem to remember hearing that DaVinci made a lute shaped like a horses skull and that he was an excellent musician.
Poor Da Vinci. With modern technology, he could have hidden a whole symphony in a picture, not just a dozen simple tunes.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
I thought that Da Vinci was smart enough to embedd some DRM into his paintings.
I'd say that it's because it has a biological purpose. We find symmetry beautiful in everything, but most importantly of all - in the human body - and face. So I believe that we find this sort of ratio pleasant because it's the pattern we use to choose partners to mate with.
The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne
It's very easy to shoot this idea down in flames, but he was a smart guy. There's no reason he thought it'd be a laugh to stick an Easter Egg in a painting. After all programmers do it, musicians put cryptic stuff in sleeve notes, writers hide recurring themes in books. Why not a painter?
Thing is, you can read stuff into anything. So if it is supposed to be musical notes, I'm sure it'll be bloody obvious, otherwise it'll sounds like crap.
And superimpose it with an image of Mona Lisa.
And then, trace an image of the egg over that new image.
You can clearly see the following words:
Scanctum Peter Cottium
Deus in re unium
hippitus hoppitus reus Domine
In suus via torreum
Lepus en re sanctum
hippitus hoppitus Deus Domine
Wow! Who would have thougt that Parker and Stone were right (again).
http://www.southparkx.net/news/1105-fantastic-easter-special-just-aired-on-comedy-central
Also... when you play the new music backwards, it says who is the final Cylon, explains everything in "Lost" and who shot J.R...
This last bit is kind of a anticlimax.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
The Aphex Twin (modern electronic musician) took a picture of himself, used audio software to convert the picture to a wav and slipped it into his last album. meaning, if you rip his album to a wav, and then run it through some filters you can get a picture of him.
Someone get the score and set it to music and make both available freely on the internet.
If he complains of copyright infringement then his book is a fraud.
Vote , aka 2215205 occurs at position 29,167,128.
Obama, aka string 1521131 occurs at position 10,015,199.
Romney, aka 18151314525, is not anywhere in the early parts of Pi.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
First the Di Vinci code, next music hidden in the painting, they need to leave this painting alone already. This smells like a publicity stunt.. I wonder if Dan Brown is going to jump all over this, and write the sequel
...then you'll easily believe that Sir Francis Bacon encoded proof that he wrote Shakespeare's plays by having the printer of Shakespeare's plays use two very slightly different fonts of type, and encoding messages in an ASCII-like binary code in which one font of type represented the zeroes and the other represented the ones.
(No, that's not a joke. That's exactly what Ignatius L. Donnelly claimed in an 1888 book entitled The Great Cryptogram)
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
You're thinking of a PBS commercial that runs very frequently. Pianist is trying to come up with a melody and keeps failing only to look out his Window to see a few birds on telephone wires - the simple melody is used as inspiration for a much more complex piece.
/. will let me link, it's http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4txDWnSWG9U otherwise, YouTube video 4txDWnSWG9U
If
I hope that no one gets the idea to rip the music from the painting
Pala, a 45-year-old musician who lives near the southern Italian city of Lecce, began studying Leonardo's painting in 2003, after hearing...all the media hype surrounding that damned Da Vinci Code book. Eureka! I have found (a paycheck!)
I am a composer and pianist, and one of my favorite ways to start a new composition is to have a friend pick 3 notes at random. As soon as I start playing those 3 notes, my brain fills in the rest of the music suggested by them. In college, I had a friend who composed lyrics the same way. At parties, someone would pick 3 notes at random, and someone else would pick 3 words. Then I would start playing, and she would sing the lyrics - and it would be pretty good. Almost magical even to me as a participant.
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group. Dude, that sig is seriously gross. I got this mental image of a geek group-sexing his MMO pals. Ugh.
I lost my sig.
I am a classical musician and listened to the sample from the link above. It is mostly monophonic (one note at a time) and given the graceful and harmonious placement of objects in the painting, it is not surprising that when turned into musical notes and played slowly and ponderously on a pipe organ, it sounds like a Gregorian chant. Perhaps what we find here is the natural correlation between graphic and musical art.
If you draw lines across the last supper, you see places where people line up. It's VERY exact. Take a ruler and pass it over you screen. There's something going on there. This is why people get hepped up about it.
Musical notes? I doubt it. A hidden message? emphatically yes. The most likely message: "DaVinci was really, really ANAL."
I am a classical musician and listened to the sample from the link above. It is mostly monophonic (one note at a time) and given the graceful and harmonious placement of objects in the painting, it is not surprising that when turned into musical notes and played slowly and ponderously on a pipe organ, it sounds like a Gregorian chant. Perhaps what we find here is the natural correlation between graphic and musical art.
Given what they could do with
Steve Ballmer http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ug4c2mqlE_0
this is music to the spheres.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
What's gonna be next? They found a diss track hidden in the Mona Lisa. Titled F-Michaelangelo.
Perhaps you'd be the one to correct me if I'm wrong... but didn't they use a 3-line stave around the time DaVinci was active? I thought the 5-line stave didn't get introduced until about the 1600's....
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
I ran this by my wife who is a professional musician with perfect pitch and a degree in music.
She says that the recording is in E-flat minor, but that organs at the time would have been in a different tuning standard, roughly one-half step different than the current standard.
E-flat minor is a very rare key for that time-period (like it wasn't used until Bach) but if you move the snippet a half step, it would have been E minor, a very common key during that period.
Furthermore, there are intervals in the snippet that weren't in common use in that time period. I couldn't keep my wife's interest long enough to determine if those intervals made more sense if the entire thing was 1/2 a step down.
Anyhow, my wife's summary: "very pretty, but probably not from DaVinci's time."
LineGrunt
PS I may have the exact note names and directions wrong as I'm _not_ a professional musician with perfect pitch... Musicians have their own undecypherable 'geek-speak.'
I believe to have read that the five line notation system wasn't widely used until 16th century. Why would Leonardo Da Vinci use a system of notation that didn't exist?
and to think: so far no one had tried to work in the bread loaves.
I've done a very carefuly musical analysis of the words contained in TFA, and when mapped through the appropriate steganographic filters it sounds shockingly like a 1985 tribute to a 1973 tribute to Roy Harper called Hats Off To Charles Obscure.
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas!
+++ATH0
He should tackle M.C. Escher next. Take some of his etchings and overlay them with tracing paper then start connecting the intersections of his stairs and whatnot. The result may surprise you.
qz
I think a more plausible explanation, if there are actually musical notes in the painting (which I doubt), is that Da Vinci had an idea that there would be a natural beauty in the music that could be expressed in the painting. He may have been trying to bring together the natural attraction we have in each art form, to create something extraordinary. Perhaps we subliminally see the music in the painting, and it adds some sort of attraction that we cannot describe.
Well actually, according to Wikipedia, "...The modern 5-line staff was first adopted in France, and became almost universal by the 16th century..." Since da Vinci's dates were April 15, 1452 - May 2, 1519, his use of a 5-line staff is conceivable. Another note: the sample MP3 is in the Phrygian mode (like an all-natural E scale). I haven't seen the actual abstracted 'score'. Could you tell me where I could see it? Is there a link to it?
In TFA, there's a picture of the painting, superimposed with a 5-line stave, and black dots at all of the points in question (hands, loaves of bread). Looks really ponderous, but I've never actually read music backwards. (perfect pitch, I'm one of those weirdos who can be handed a score and hear the music in their head when they read it)
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
... you can clearly hear "I buried St. Paul"
What, like this? http://www.the-martians.co.uk/upgrade/e107_plugins/content/content.php?content.20
Hardly a new idea (see also "Holy Blood Holy Grail") There's pictures and everything on ours though....
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
He said ascii, not a == 1...
I'm tired of nutjobs claiming to find a secret code by a man who can't confirm it because he's dead! So I'm going to find the truth at the source. *Searches yellow pages for mediums*
How about they decode the music, then find that "RADIUM" warezed license for Sound Forge in there ?
Dig that painter up and watch the RIAA sue his decomposed ass.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Ah, yes, the always-reliable Associated Press. Note that the photo caption says "musical notes encoded in Leonardo Da Vinci's 'Last Supper'." Not "allegedly" or "purportedly" or "possibly"...they are encoded ! This is the kind of utter bullshit actual Renaissance scholars have to deal with constantly. I don't envy them. It's no wonder that people who are genuine specialists in the era don't want to talk to the press. Instead, we get a career-enhancing pretender, utterly undistinguished as either composer or scholar, who arbitrarily assigns a grid (staff) to Leonardo's fresco, and announces a miracle. Which happens to coincide with his release of a CD and a book, which is available for sale to the faithful and the terminally credulous. Now that is a true miracle! Well, Sr. Pala is 45, so his revelation came along at a fortuitous time for his non-career. He's not in Wikipedia or MySpace yet, and this is probably his only chance. There are major errors of fact, history, and basic music scholarship - for a start, a musical staff is meaningless without a clef. Which of the dozen clefs then in use was it? If so, why was that particular tonic chosen? And why is the only "authority" quoted not a music scholar, nor even an art historian, but the director of a private for-profit Leonardo "museum" in Vinci? The irony is getting pretty thick here.
Its the orginal DRM
is that when translated from the Italian, it says, "Everybody's gone surfin'... surf Napoli way."
hey, I think Leo's on to something...
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Any conclusion can be drawn from a sufficiently complex data set. The correlary to that is that it becomes harder to PROVE any one conclusion as the data set becoms more complex, exponentialy so. Add in centuries of signal degridation and you are, basicaly, screwed.
Just look at how scollars argue not only about what Shakespear was trying to say, but if he actualy wrote the plays in the first place. Untill someone invents a time machine so we can go back and ask the artists what they were thinking, looking for "secret knowledge" in old works is folly. It's more Rorschach test than search for truth. Either put a print on the wall and enjoy it or pick up a paint brush and figure out what YOU have to say.
You can listen to the music here. And going off CNN's picture of the cover of the book, which shows the notes, they don't look particularily well lined up, with things kinda offset this way or that way a little bit. Looks like they definitely had a margin of error they were working with.
Planet Zebeth - Metroid with a twist
When will the RIAA raid Da Vinci's Tomb for further reasearch?
If the intervals weren't in common use, moving the key will not make a difference. An interval is a relative distance between two notes, and a key is the set of notes that you're using. If you move the key then you are moving the entire set of notes, so the relative distance between notes will not change.
It's like this:
len(a[ (intervalStart + key1) : (intervalEnd + key1) ]) == len(a[ (intervalStart + key2) : (intervalEnd + key2) ])
Your brain is not a computer.