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Re:With Musical Cryptography, Composers Can Hide Messages in... by pwaivers on Tuesday March 27, 2018 @04:13PM (#16692289)
So would it be possible to literally talk through music? What if notes (or strings of notes) stood for different words and ideas. It would be like a set of pictograms, but for music.
Re:With Musical Cryptography, Composers Can Hide Messages in... by notduncansmith on Tuesday March 27, 2018 @04:27PM (#16692430)
Yes (that’s what spoken language is).

You might enjoy a trip down the wiki hole starting here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication_theory

Re:With Musical Cryptography, Composers Can Hide Messages in... by KineticLensman on Wednesday March 28, 2018 @07:59AM (#16697005)
The Talking Drums [0] of Africa used the pitch of the drum to mimic the tone patterns of speech. They were used to communicate between different villages, sometimes using known phrases from poems to encode more complex concepts.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talking_drum

Re:With Musical Cryptography, Composers Can Hide Messages in... by paliilap on Wednesday March 28, 2018 @06:58AM (#16696785)
There's a constructed language called Solresol which works on this idea. It uses the 7 notes of the major scale (or the solfege system) to communicate, and this simple fact makes it quite flexible because it could technically be projected onto any 7-unit system (e.g. colours of the rainbow, hand symbols, pictographs).

I don't know how practical it is and it seems to be quite obscure nowadays, but it's got some interesting ideas. Antonyms, for example, are constructed by a phrase performed in retrograde. Its a very minimal system which makes the vocabulary somewhat constrained, but flexibility of it is pretty neat since you can vary the method of communication once you know the basic system.

Re:With Musical Cryptography, Composers Can Hide Messages in... by asdsa5325 on Tuesday March 27, 2018 @08:22PM (#16694055)
There is an almost dead language that used melodic whistling to communicate. It was originally used so people could communicate over larger distances (carries further than yelling). There are still a few people left who speak it.