Hey,
love this puzzle, and it’s also a pleasure to come across this poem and the Satriani album, it’s very inspiring.
So this is completely beyond me but I have a few ideas that I wanted to share, maybe someone can do something with it or maybe the ideas are completely off, so sorry in advance if I’m wasting your time lol.
I used a MIDI converter and then manually adjusted the output to transcribe the melody. If you zoom out, the MIDI notes amount to patterns that remind me a bit of garbled symbols, as in, there are some (only few) parts that seem like round arcs or that would maybe seem like some kind of fragments of letters if you would connect the notes, but they don’t make any sense. Certain things repeat themselves all the time, and also there’s a few parts where there seems to be some partial symmetry too.
Maybe, when you say that something can be turned and it stays the same, the thing that comes to mind is octave shifts. So what if you would have to shift lines of a note, or maybe even specific individual notes, up or down an octave - you’d get the same note information, just higher or lower pitched. You’d do this until the position of the notes makes sense somehow and you could see information, or patterns, or dots that would connect to letters.
Or maybe lines of notes or individual notes shift to the side as well so the picture lines up to a correct display of information somehow according to instructions derived from the metadata or the image? And maybe this could be done in a way that would make it ‘the same’ as before the shift, in some sense? The kind of shifting I have in mind reminds me a bit of this puzzle from a game. Look up the water puzzle from Resident Evil 3 (PS1) on YouTube, can’t put the link here because of limits.
And maybe, the fact that a few note lines are completely empty needs to be accounted for, and they need to be ‘filled’ somehow according to derived rules, to complete the ‘picture’?
Also it is noteworthy that the first ten (or strictly speaking, the first eight) notes are not playing in the same evenly rhythmical pattern as the rest do, they’re syncopated and in a weird pattern. Maybe they contain some form of information, and maybe it has something to do with the colors in the corner of the album art?
How did you get the instruction to draw something? What comes to mind is maybe drawing lines between MIDI notes according to a set of derived rules after they’ve been aligned and positioned properly. And possibly, it could be suspected that maybe also arabic symbols could be drawn, no clue about that though.
One thing to note though is that I didn’t include the percussion at all in any of this. Maybe as someone else pointed out, the cymbal cointains information, as it seems to shift in the stereo field throughout the track.
Also what’s the 160 characters in the comment field of the music file?
Maybe, some information that can be derived from either the music/MIDI or the picture can be used to make a password to decrypt hidden steganography’d information in the other? I think both music files and images can be used for steganography.
Finally, and this is just completely out there, the LP version of the Satriani Album has A1-A5 and B1-B5 numberings. Seeing how Album structure played a role in the first puzzle, maybe this could be something, especially since A and B are also musical notes. Incidentally, B is one of the notes that contain musical/MIDI information, while A doesn’t (not sure if A would even be part of the enigmatic scale of this piece to begin with though). Maybe some information from a track on the album that has a certain number must be used somehow, or its title, and also Snakes and Locusts remind me of the desert where the poem plays out, etc… Maybe “the heavy rock” from the poem literally means the heavy rock music and you have to do something with the album, analogous to something in the poem, etc…
PS: I find it noteworthy the music file is m4a and not mp3. Is there something relevant that can be done with one and not with the other?
Anyway, really looking forward to seeing the solution of the puzzle some day. Crazy how it’s been out in the open for a year lol.
