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 was wondering if you could teleport to any archive to do Voynich research which would be your top choice; ideally what would be your top 3. Please exclude from your answer the Beinecke as that is an obvious and not revealing answer.
My top two/three are:
1) Milan State Archives
2) Vatican Archives
3) A few possibilities such as:Yale University Library(Not the Beinecke)
Undoubtedly, so far, I find You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. the most intriguing page. I think that if there is a substitution cipher that works, it has to be accounted for by the page f66r.
Just to shed some light on oddly working substitution cipher: Arabic readers, most of them, know that when the Arabic script was used to record the Quran at the first time, it didn't have diacritics. So, many letters were represented with the same character. Thus, b, t, thorn th, y were all represented the same, d, the th, were represented the same, and so on. So it's not impossible to find a substitution cipher that attributes many sounds to the same character, therefore attaching the rest of EVA, to perhaps, vowel signs and/or liturgical markings.
One intriguing aspect, is how You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. tends to display, repeatedly, EVA-d symbols that are bolder than usual, as well as some gallows. Could that be a sieve to select letters on other pages, much like a masking aid to decode other pages?
I've been reading about Voynich manuscript for some time and like many people here I'm coming to conclusion
that it can't be a simple substitution cipher, letter for a letter.
It also seems to me quite probable that we shouldn't treat each of Voynich letters independently but rather work
with common groups of letter like or, ol, ain etc.
If we did so, another problem emerges however. If we assume that groups of Voynich letters code single letters in the plaintext
then the supposed words in the plaintext become really short - usually 2 or 3 letters.
If we treat space as space then text made of such words would be generally very improbable, unless we assume that the words
are heavily shortened.
My question is - would you accept and under what conditions such a theoretical solution as below?
D scn ol e prd lc e scn prr i lbt or amp stn obd ol rcn omp cnd cng un aq ur dmd inf tm lu cqt lnt agt
I created it by radical shortening of this text taken from "De materia medica": You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
De Sicyonio oleo. E praedictis licet et Sicyonium sic parare . In lebetem oris ampli stanno obductum olei recentis omphacini candidique congium unum , aquae vero dimidium infundito , tum igne levi coquito , leniter agitando.
And another question - if the original text is shortened like this, would anybody different from the creator of it be able to read it?
I realise that people in Middle Ages used abbreviations much more than we use today but everything has its limits I guess.
Hello, here is data based on the ranking of usage of word-endings in the manuscript and their relative ranks based on whether they end a line, or end a word mid-line.
Quote:-sama (EVA -dy) ranks first as word ending, and first as line ending
-nero (EVA -aiin) ranks second as word ending, and third as line ending
-nese (EVA -am) ranks 20th as word ending, and second as line ending. In fact, it appears 178 times in the middle of a line, and 424 times at the end of a line.
-neme (EVA -al) ranks 7th as word ending, and 4th as line ending. In fact, it appears 1588 times in the middle of a line, and 213 times at the end of a line
-nehe (EVA -ar) ranks 5th as word ending, and 5th as line ending. In fact, it appears 2052 times in the middle of a line, and 170 times at the end of a line
-rame (EVA -ol) ranks 4th as word ending, and 6th as line ending. In fact, it appears 3008 times in the middle of a line, and 167 times at the end of a line
-mema (EVA -ly) ranks 19th as word ending, and 7th as line ending. In fact, it appears 187 times in the middle of a line, and 134 times at the end of a line
-hema (EVA -ry) ranks 27th as word ending, and 8th as line ending. In fact, it appears 85 times in the middle of a line, and 102 times at the end of a line
-tema (EVA -ky) ranks 9th as word ending, and 9th as line ending. In fact, it appears 507 times in the middle of a line, and 100 times at the end of a line
-nama (EVA -ey) ranks 3rd as word ending, and 10th as line ending. In fact, it appears 3280 times in the middle of a line, and 100 times at the end of a line
-rahe (EVA -or) ranks 6th as word ending, and 11th as line ending. In fact, it appears 1763 times in the middle of a line, and 81 times at the end of a line
-tima (EVA -ty) ranks 15th as word ending, and 12th as line ending. In fact, it appears 298 times in the middle of a line, and 68 times at the end of a line
My observations:
EVA endings “am”, “ly”, “ry”, “ty” seem to finish ideas.
EVA endings “ol”, “ey”, “or” seem to be mid-idea.
But if we want to be accurate, maybe we should consider EVA ending “ey” as an outlier and correct our assumption. Thus, character “y” should be seen as a punctuating character, while characters “ol” and “or” as grammatical cases of mid-sentence meanings. Probably, instead of grammatical case, one should see them as maybe a number ending for singular and plural. If “ol” and “or” stand for plural and singular, or some similar feature, the stem of the words ending in “ol” and “or” should appear irrespective of how the word ends, which we definitely see in the manuscript, and the 19 most common word stems using “or” use “ol” more often systematically. If plural/singular meaning should be attached to “or” and “ol”, one should explore, for those 19 most common word stems the other endings that appear systematically. Within these 19 most common word stems for the endings “or” and “ol”, “ol” ranks second as a word ending, and “or” ranks seventh as a word ending.
The systematic use of word finals that come seventh or earlier in the list with the word stems that we are considering here is pretty noteworthy.
Thus, the word endings come in the following order:
Quote:-nero (EVA -aiin) comes 1st with the 19 words, and comes 2nd globally
-rame (EVA -ol) comes 2nd with the 19 words, and comes 4th globally
-nama (EVA -ey) comes 3rd with the 19 words, and comes 3rd globally
-sama (EVA -dy) comes 4th with the 19 words, and comes 1st globally
-nehe (EVA -ar) comes 5th with the 19 words, and comes 5th globally
-neme (EVA -al) comes 6th with the 19 words, and comes 7th globally
-rahe (EVA -or) comes 7th with the 19 words, and comes 6th globally
When it comes to word structure of the stems that constitute the relationship, we can extend the 19 most common word stems list to 22 thus obtaining the following regular expressions
We also have ta, te, ti, di, tena. (case_2)
We also have sa, ha, he, as well as nu, nuna, no, nona.
If necessary, I will provide EVA correspondence with these word structures. From word_stem + case_2 at least, we get the following EVA list:
This question challenges me as someone in this forum told me that the likelihood of someone resembling his culture and society is high. Obviously, when we deal with a new gene in an evolving species, we get to recognize its uniqueness. Bur when we deal with people, we think everyone is subject to a conformist view.
Yet, I don't want to come with assumptions without raising a new question: let's say someone wants to produce something as puzzling as the Voynich MS.
In your opinion, which strategy would bring more beneficial results: creating a cryptic script for English? Or creating a whole new language and a script for that language?
If 2 is your opinion, do you think you'd go for an English looking language or go for something that has unheard of features which wouldn't easily translate into the languages you already know?
