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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.
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Da Vinci accidentally misplaced his car keys in the painting too, but died before he could find it.
True story.
.. 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...
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.
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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.
...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.
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."
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.
Poor Da Vinci. With modern technology, he could have hidden a whole symphony in a picture, not just a dozen simple tunes.
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I think it's a mistake to think this is just a simple pattern. DaVinci knew a lot about what's pleasing to the eye in terms of proportion, color tone, etc. Lot's of things in nature are based on fractals or the golden ratio (amongst other things) and for some reason we find these patterns pleasant. The human body itself has a fractal pattern to some extent so the last supper must be full of this stuff. If when you take these patterns from a visual medium and convert them to an auditory medium people find them harmonious that's not especially surprising. Why people find these sorts of patterns attractive is however a very interesting question.
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
I thought that Da Vinci was smart enough to embedd some DRM into his paintings.
Oh, he clearly was; you're just backwards. The Last Supper is actually the song, and the painting is the DRM. It lasted 500 years, which is pretty darn good for a DRM scheme too.
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No, because Da Vinci wasn't an American artist. Unless upon hearing of the discovery of America in 1492, he sneaked out in his submarine from 1495-1498 to paint the last supper over there. Hm. The timing is actually too perfect for it not to have happened. Go get them RIAA!
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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!)
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.
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?
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.
... you can clearly hear "I buried St. Paul"
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.
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