Planning for Voynich Manuscript Day 2024

[ReneZ]

I will post a first update before the end of May

I've been making good progress on this, so I can already provide the "first update before the end of May" now.

There are countless ways in which one can convert the Voynich MS text to music.
If one isn't very careful, the result is likely to be a chaotic concatenation of dissonances.

My idea was to combine Voynich theory and some elementary music theory in order to avoid that, and instead come up with something that one can listen to without getting a headache.

I now have the necessary tools in place:

1) A script to pre-process the Voynich text, doing some minor regularisations, and some more significant ones.
These will be described in an accompanying document, if this activity is going ahead

2) A tool to convert this text into notes. Basically another text file.

3) Another (more generic) tool to convert this text file with notes into a Midi file

This is combined with the Ubuntu sequencer software 'Rosegarden' and an oldish but good General Midi expander.
I am using the sequencer only to play the Midi files. I was prepared to do some manual note entry, but that turns out not to be necessary.

A first rendition of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. has me quite pleased, even though I haven't implemented the planned chord progression logic yet.
The melody is a bit erratic, but that was to be expected. It's also way too long to play in its entirety.

Part of the plan is that the text of the various sections in the MS result in recognisably different music.

Next I need to implement the missing logic, then do some more checks, and spend some time tuning it all (literally).

Also the text-to-music logic will be described in the accompanying document, if this is going ahead.
I am quite optimisitic about that.

The final update will come before the end of June, with the GO/NOGO decision for Voynich MS day, and the decision in which audio format it will be presented. For the moment I am thinking PPT video.