The Voynich Ninja

VMS Day 2024: Converting the Voynich MS text to music

(If there is going to be a dedicated group for this event, this thread may of course be moved there).

Writing on the eve of VMS Day 2024...

As announced, I developed a method to convert the Voynich MS text to music.
This method takes into account numerous known properties of the MS text in order to produce a result that can be listened to without too much discomfort.

I have used this to create one piece of music per page of the MS, for a representative group of pages, and the links to the music will be available from 4 August onward, via this link: 

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From 13:30 to 14:00 CEST I will give a short presentation how this music has been generated.
For those who cannot attend, or wish to know more in advance, there is also a paper about this. This does not include some of the basic music theory that will be part of the on-line presentation, and goes into some other details.

It can be found at my academia page, but also simply via You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
This may appear in your browser, but in order for the hypertext links to work, one has to download the pdf file first, and read that copy.

The above link to the music files will be activated at the start of the event.
I will add a short note here at that time.

The page with the music links is now up.

In case of issues or questions, please just respond in this thread.

This was so interesting, Rene, and lovely to listen to. It would be interesting to compare the results of applying the transformation to herbal vs. astronomical vs. balneological etc. sections.

Many thanks Lisa. You can hear the differences via the web page I provided, as links to music have been sorted by illustration types. Some clearly audible features are the words starting qo-, the unattached finals and of course the overall Currier or RZ language (Major vs. minor).
The repeating strings like 'qokeedy qokeedy qokeedy' are not a problem at all, but overall the music can get a bit monotonous/repetitive.
Who knows, it might be usable in a Voynich spa, with its green waters :-)

I am doing a parallel analysis on the underlying word (chunk) model to see how and how well it fits in the various sections and/or hands, which is probably more what you had in mind. This will take some more time to complete.