Dorabella Cipher as Musical Inspiration
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.
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