Dorabella Cipher as Musical Inspiration
This work addresses a long-standing cryptographic puzzle for historians and music enthusiasts, but it is incremental as it explores a new hypothesis without claiming a definitive solution.
The researchers tackled the problem of deciphering the Dorabella cipher by investigating the hypothesis that it represents enciphered music, using n-gram models to produce a decipherment with musical qualities and transforming it into a listenable melody.
The Dorabella cipher is an encrypted note written by English composer Edward Elgar, which has defied decipherment attempts for more than a century. While most proposed solutions are English texts, we investigate the hypothesis that Dorabella represents enciphered music. We weigh the evidence for and against the hypothesis, devise a simplified music notation, and attempt to reconstruct a melody from the cipher. Our tools are n-gram models of music which we validate on existing music corpora enciphered using monoalphabetic substitution. By applying our methods to Dorabella, we produce a decipherment with musical qualities, which is then transformed via artful composition into a listenable melody. Far from arguing that the end result represents the only true solution, we instead frame the process of decipherment as part of the composition process.