The Voynich Ninja

The recent discussion You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. drew my attention back to Stephen Gorbos's musical work "Such sphinxes as these obey no one but their master," which is supposed to have drawn somehow on the Voynich Manuscript.  I wasn't able to find any other reference to Gorbos on this forum, so I'm guessing his composition hasn't been much discussed here.

But it doesn't seem to have been much discussed anywhere else, either.  Gorbos's You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. has the audio and a text "about" the composition, but the latter has nothing to say about any particular process by which the Voynich Manuscript fed into it.  An You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. on the same site states that the work was "inspired" by the manuscript, but again without providing any specifics about the connection.  Finally, an You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. on the Beinecke's own site states that Gorbos "drew from the text," and that the composition was one of several in which composers had "used" Beinecke mansucripts as "inspiration"; but again, no specifics.

That's all the information I was able to find.  Does anyone here know anything more?

Based on the sources I've mentioned, my impression is that Gorbos probably used the Voynich Manuscript as "inspiration" in only a very loose sense, and that his composition probably doesn't map content from the Voynich Manuscript to music in any consistent or replicable way.  There wouldn't be anything wrong with that; indeed, he never claimed to have done any such thing, as far as I can see.  But the fact that his work exists might have discouraged others from playing around with more direct mappings of text to music by creating a false impression that this has already been tried.

The idea has sometimes been put forward that Voynichese is actually a musical notation.  If it is, "deciphering" it correctly ought to produce something that sounds conventionally musical, like this audio pulled algorithmically from some plates depicting programs for automatic organ barrels in Athanasius Kircher's Musurgia Universalis (which we can thereby recognize as containing "real" music):

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On the other hand, if a mapping of text to music sounds thoroughly weird and atonal, I'd consider that the equivalent of a "word salad," and strong evidence of a "wrong" solution.  For example, I was never able to get any plausible-sounding music out of this plate in Robert Fludd's Utriusque Cosmi Maioris Scilicet et Minoris Metaphysica, Physica atque Technica Historia:

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I don't know whether this means that I haven't hit on the right mode of decipherment yet, or whether the plate is just a mock-up of a medium for automatic music without any "real" musical content in it.

Now, in retrospect, I guess I'd always assumed that Gorbos had done something similar to what I'd done some years back when I tried to play that Robert Fludd plate: choosing a method for mapping an inscription to music and implementing it without worrying about whether the result sounded conventionally musical or not -- or maybe even hoping it wouldn't sound conventionally musical, since that would be boring from an experimental music standpoint.  That is, I supposed he'd come up with a musical equivalent of a "word salad" and reveled in it as a musical equivalent to Dadaist poetry.

But now I suspect Gorbos didn't do anything like that after all.  So I'm halfway tempted to try it myself.

What I have in mind is an algorithm that would take a standard EVA transcription as input and convert it automatically into music (output in MIDI), ideally handling Voynichese paragraph, line, and word structures in such a way that they're still recognizable as structures.  That is, I'd want the mapping to be aurally intelligible in the same way that EVA is visually intelligible (and "almost pronounceable"): listening to the music ought to help us latch onto patterns that are "really there," as an alternative way of experiencing them and puzzling over them.

Some crude initial ideas:

(1) Interpret each Voynichese word as either a single note or a chord, with a particular duration -- but what word elements should represent what?  Is there any way to arrange this such that every word would be practically "playable"?
(2) Interpret gallows as clefs, key signatures, or accidentals?
(3) Interpret each paragraph as a separate "piece" of music?
(4) Interpret each line as a stanza-like unit within the "piece" (but through-composed and non-repeating)?
(5) Map the most common word structures to the most "ordinary" musical features -- but how?

I don't know a lot about music. But my understanding is at the time we had two types of music, the plain (as in plainchant) and the polyrythmic, which was just starting to come in and which was forcing the development of the five staff bar, which replaced the earlier neumatic notation system.
So I suppose you'd first have to map a "rhythm" onto the VM text and take it from there. See below.
Musical notation was well established by the time of the VM, see ie You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. from c.1330, over a hundred years earlier than the VM but already very identifiable to modern eyes as musical notation.
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An algorithm to convert the Voynich Manuscript into music is an intriguing idea. Here's a suggested approach to accomplish this:

Preprocessing: First, preprocess the transcription to remove any irrelevant characters or symbols. Split the text into paragraphs, lines, and words.

Mapping characters to musical elements: Define a mapping between Voynichese characters and musical elements. Some suggestions:

a. Map each character to a specific pitch or note.
b. Map gallows characters to clefs, key signatures, or accidentals.
c. Map the length of a word to note duration (shorter words have shorter durations, longer words have longer durations).

Chords and harmony: To create chords, you can use a few different strategies:

a. Group consecutive characters in a word and treat them as notes that form a chord.
b. Use a music theory approach to create chords based on the intervals and scales associated with the chosen notes.

Structure and phrasing: Follow these suggestions to define the structure and phrasing of the generated music:

a. Interpret each paragraph as a separate "piece" of music.
b. Interpret each line as a stanza-like unit within the "piece" (but through-composed and non-repeating).
c. Optionally, you can use the frequency of certain word structures to dictate the repetition or variation of musical motifs.

MIDI output: Once the mapping is complete, convert the generated notes, chords, and other musical elements into a MIDI file using a library like mido in Python.


Remember that this is a high-level approach, and you'll need to fine-tune the details depending on the specific patterns and structures you discover in the Voynich Manuscript. The key is to experiment with different mappings and musical interpretations until you find an arrangement that's aurally intelligible and highlights the patterns present in the text.

Just a wild thought. If vords are musical phrases. And regular glyphs are musical notes. Then gallows could be two-note combinations with the more complex <benched gallows> representing chords. It would be easy to play such a pattern on any guitar-style instrument.

(22-03-2023, 09:12 PM)davidjackson Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.a. Map each character to a specific pitch or note.
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c. Map the length of a word to note duration (shorter words have shorter durations, longer words have longer durations).
<...>
a. Group consecutive characters in a word and treat them as notes that form a chord.

Thanks for these suggestions!

If each character represents a note, and the characters in a word form a chord together, and duration is based on the length of a word, then it seems to follow that two attributes of a chord -- (1) how many notes are in it and (2) its duration -- would always increase and decrease together.  So it might be worth decoupling those two parameters in the interest of variety.  That would mean interpreting some element in the script as "note class" and some other element as "duration."  

I'm toying with the idea of interpreting "curves" and "lines" as note-class indicators, and final flourishes (like the ones that distinguish EVA [n] and [r]) as duration indicators.  Which notes are sounded could perhaps be determined by transitions between clusters of curves and lines, e.g., EVA [chaii] = ccc\\\ = notes 3 and 6 of a scale sounded together.  Then EVA [chair] and [chain] could represent that same chord at two different durations.  Extending this scheme to other characters such as [o] and [d] might be tricky, though.