Cipher Mysteries

Here's an intriguing musical cryptogram for you courtesy of Qaiwolf on Fark.com (comment #50 at the bottom of this page). Don't know where he/she got it from, but I'm sure you'll appreciate it. Can you decipher its hidden meaning? May not be as tricky as you think! :-)

Are you a male Caucasian, 51-60, living near upstate NY, and interested in a non-speaking, "wizard-esk" (I guess "-esque") acting role in a vaguely Voynich Manuscript-related film to be filmed 15th-25th October 2009? Well... Phill Allison, a directing major at the NYC school of visual arts, is holding "auditions / meetings" in Valatie on 8th-11th October 2009 for this role, so feel ...

Here's something a little bit more interactive than usual, please feel free to add your comments. :-) I woke up this morning in a Voynich Manuscript half-dream with the chorus of Belinda Carlisle's 1988 hit "I Get Weak" (written by Diane Warren) looping round incessantly. As with most dreams it probably meant nothing (sorry Sigmund), but it did set me thinking... ...

According to a nice little 2004 New Scientist article by Kevin Jones (Professor of Music at Kingston University, my most recent alma mater), even though Elgar composed his cipher note to Dora Penny in 1897, he appears to have reused the same 24-token cipher alphabet in an exercise book 30 ...

...or, in all its prolixitous glory, "The Six Unsolved Ciphers: Inside the Mysterious Codes That Have Confounded the World's Greatest Cryptographers", by Richard Belfield (2007). It was previously published by Orion in the UK as "Can You Crack the Enigma Code?" in 2006. You'd have thought I'd be delighted by this offering: after all, it covers the Voynich Manuscript, the Beale Papers, ...

No, it's not another Voynich Manuscript novel for the Big Fat List, but instead the working title (according to a blog entry here) for a track by 1980s German Synthpop funsters Alphaville in an upcoming album. And no, much as I enjoyed "Big In Japan" I don't quite think that really counts as a huge lurch into ...

If you haven't seen Luigi Serafini's Codex Seraphinianus before, I heartily recommend stomping over to this 230-photo Flickr set and checking it out. It's now reasonably well-known that the book's strange page-numbering system has been cracked (it's a funny kind of base-21 counting, with various unlucky numbers removed), but the text itself remains enigmatic. Ivan Derzhanski has posted some ...

Many people reading this probably will already have vageuly heard of contemporary Swiss composer Hanspeter Kyburz (b.1960) and his orchestral work "The Voynich Cipher Manuscript", which was inspired by the VMs. Not a lot of people know (or care) that Kyburz also inserted in the work three short poems by maverick Futurist genius Velimir Khlebnikov, I'd guess because ...

Here's another (and actually quite good) example of the Voynich meme eking its elliptical way into the collective cultural consciousness: courtesy of MySpace, a Californian duo in Hollister have put out a couple of tracks inspired by (and under the name of) the Voynich Manuscript. I'm actually a musician/composer myself, so I thought I'd review them here for you, ...

Here's a trailer for a Voynich Manuscript-inspired dance/theatre production (courtesy of YouTube). Lots of nymphs and Voynichese back-projection, if that presses your buttons... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xi28Djh4LfM