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The Voynich as a rhythmic structure and height distribution in the Voynicl hypothesis

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  • The Voynich as a rhythmic structure and height distribution in the Voynicl hypothesis
• The Voynich as a rhythmic structure and height distribution in the Voynicl hypothesis

• The Voynich as a rhythmic structure and height distribution in the Voynicl hypothesis

  nintus > 11-05-2026, 05:35 PM

  Hello everyone.
  
  
  Today I’d like to share one of my ideas about the Voynich script. Remembering my last experience here with you, I decided to approach it through a calligraphic analysis of the text, using an Excel spreadsheet.
  After studying many EVA transcriptions and different interpretations of the Voynich manuscript, especially the work of Stephen Bax, I looked into phonetic studies and the attempts to match glyphs with specific sounds. In my opinion, those correspondences often seem sporadic and subjective. I also explored the idea of Gregorian chants derived from the manuscript.
  The Voynich text has a remarkable lexical redundancy. With very few glyphs, a massive text was written, yet many pages almost feel like obsessive repetitions of nearly identical words. It gives the impression of something chant-like, melodic, repetitive — almost like a litany, a prayer, or something similar.
  This aspect really caught my attention. How is it possible to generate a fully coherent text with so few letters?
  I rule out the hypothesis that it was simply a fake or meaningless text created only for profit.
  This is where medieval Gregorian chant comes into play. The Voynich text seems to share several similarities with it. For example, medieval Gregorian notation used four lines in the tetragram and only a few note heights. The notes, often written in square form and called neumes, were used to identify syllables. They could appear in different forms that modified pronunciation.
  What interests me most is the number of lines and how, with only a few notes, an entire text could be written.
  There are also compound neumes like podatus, clivis, torculus, and porrectus — groups of notes forming a single syllable — as well as simple neumes like punctum and virga, where a single note represents one syllable.
  If we compare this idea with the Voynich text, the compound neumes could resemble compound glyphs such as ch, sh, ckh, cfh, cph, or cth.
  
  
  Example of a neume with square annotations
     
  
  While studying the Voynich script, what immediately stood out to me was the visual shape of the glyphs themselves. They reminded me of medieval Gregorian notation.
  At that point, I started analyzing the glyphs and their heights, arranging them into a kind of scale. Of course, the text is written in cursive, so it isn’t as regular as Gregorian notes, but I tried to estimate the heights and see if this perspective could reveal something interesting.
  
     
  
  Please ignore the heights marked with a “+” sign, which I used for compound glyphs with ligatures or connected forms. In Excel I couldn’t make the calculations work correctly with the “+” signs, so I had to leave them out. I suspect those glyphs may represent something additional compared to the others, but for now I don’t want to push the theory too far.
  Now I’ll explain exactly what I did.
  I took the manuscript and assigned heights to the glyphs: A high, M medium, B low, C short.
  
     
  
  This is how I categorized the glyph heights.
  I should point out again that the Voynich text is written in cursive. Someone might notice, for example, that in the word “ykal” I classified the glyph “l” as C, even though visually it could seem closer to B. But after checking most instances of that glyph, I noticed that, like the “y” glyph, part of it often extends below the line. In other cases, the “y” glyph appears shorter than expected.
  Since I obviously cannot manually retranscribe the entire manuscript using these rules, I decided to catalog the glyphs this way and use the full EVA transcription by Takeshi, despite the errors I found in it. That’s another discussion entirely. What matters here are the calculations I’m about to explain. A few errors are acceptable
  
  Method
  
  
  What I did was import the entire EVA transcription of the manuscript into an Excel file:
  You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
  After that, I needed a way to understand whether this method could reveal any interesting patterns in the text. For example, I wanted to measure how frequently glyph heights changed across entire pages, to see whether there was some regularity or complete chaos — in other words, whether the glyph heights had meaning or were simply decorative or random.
  
  Procedure
  
  I took each EVA page and arranged it line by line into columns.
  
  
  Then I created a formula that transformed the entire text into the height categories I had chosen, returning each line as a sequence of height letters.
  After that, I created additional columns containing the number of A, M, B, and C heights, so I could count how often each height appeared on every line.
  I also created another column to calculate the Runs for each line. By “Runs,” I mean the number of transitions from one height to another between consecutive letters.
  Then I created another column for the average Runs per page, combining all the extracted data. This was the result I was most interested in: the average Runs.
  I also generated columns showing the percentage distribution of each height on every page, to see how much the patterns changed from one page to another.
  I even tried to create a column for entropy calculations, but I couldn’t manage to make it work.
  
     
  
  The Excel file I generated contains all these results. At the bottom right there are the average Runs for each page. In the center there are the percentages of each height category across the entire page. On the left side, I also made a comparison using a Gregorian chant. I took the notes written on four lines and converted them into my height categories. I wasn’t interested in identifying the actual notes themselves — I simply took them in sequence. As you can see, the distribution is very balanced, and the average Runs are surprisingly close to those found in the Voynich manuscript. It is impossible to get similar results with a natural language text, even with stylized texts that visually resemble Voynich. Those tend to produce much more chaotic and irregular patterns. Going back to the Voynich data: if you look at the average Runs on each page, they are all remarkably similar. The percentages of the different height categories also remain very consistent from page to page.
  
  
  Conclusion
  
  
  In my opinion, these results suggest that the glyph heights are not random, and that the encoding method could perhaps be related in some way to medieval Gregorian chant notation — though I can’t say exactly how. Still, these are the patterns I found. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

• RE: The Voynich as a rhythmic structure and height distribution in the Voynicl hypothesis

  nintus > 14-05-2026, 02:55 PM

  Here is the table with the first 80 pages of the manuscript and the average run results. The first column shows the page number, the second column shows the number of glyphs, the third column shows the number of runs, and the fourth column shows the average of the runs.
     

• RE: The Voynich as a rhythmic structure and height distribution in the Voynicl hypothesis

  Mauro > 14-05-2026, 10:01 PM

  I personally doubt the VMS could be a form of musical notation, ie. no repeats of a theme are discernible and I find it difficult to believe the VMS  is a huge Stockhausen-like medieval composition. But who knows! There's a youtube video by René Zandbergen where he 'plays' the VMS as music which could interest you: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. . By the way, do you know about the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. ?

• RE: The Voynich as a rhythmic structure and height distribution in the Voynicl hypothesis

  nintus > 15-05-2026, 11:15 AM

  I agree that the text is not some kind of musical composition. By checking the distribution percentages of the text’s pitches against Gregorian chant, this becomes immediately apparent, in Gregorian chant, the pitch distribution is almost regular, while in the Voynich manuscript it is not. About 50% of the glyphs are B, which suggests that there is no musicality behind the text. What I was trying to point out is that the text may perhaps have been encoded in some way using a musical form. I started from the idea of Gregorian chant because of a possible structural similarity. I already knew the video, thanks.You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. I wasn’t familiar with the Guidonian hand; I have to say it’s interesting, but it is very different from the theory I had hypothesized earlier. Thank you for your reply.

• RE: The Voynich as a rhythmic structure and height distribution in the Voynicl hypothesis

  Rafal > Yesterday, 11:39 AM

  I considered the option that Voynichese is music.
  
  I even imagined some crazy man who believed that he could hear the music of the spheres: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
  
  You probably know this theory - when planets move they make some sound which feels like the most beautiful music. Unfortunately people lost the capability of hearing that. But hey, if you step on some spiritual path then maybe eventually you will hear it again. And you may want to write it down but in the way so those other simpletons couldn't read it.
  
  But no, I actually don't believe it. And I feel that the "music theory" is one of these things that are practically impossible to prove or disprove.
  
  I guess we could assign some music notes to Voynichese symbols in a systematic way. Would it produce "nice" music, following all these theoretical rules of musical harmony? I haven't checked but I suppose not.
  
  And what if we end with some "ugly" music, a kind of medieval charivari ( You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. ) ? Could it be the solution? Probably not but try to definitely prove that it isn't.

• RE: The Voynich as a rhythmic structure and height distribution in the Voynicl hypothesis

  DONJCH > Yesterday, 12:22 PM

  [quote="nintus" pid='84013' dateline='1778517346']
  
  This could be a fruitful avenue.
  A few years back somebody did a statistical analysis that arranged related vords and showed that they tended to rise to a crescendo of complexity then subside again. iirc there was more than one series. The behaviour seemed to be music-like.
  I don't know enough about music of any sort to judge and I don't remember enough to find the thread again.
  Maybe some of the leading researchers here still remember this.

• RE: The Voynich as a rhythmic structure and height distribution in the Voynicl hypothesis

  nintus > Yesterday, 01:59 PM

  (Yesterday, 11:39 AM)Rafal Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I considered the option that Voynichese is music.
  
  I even imagined some crazy man who believed that he could hear the music of the spheres: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
  
  You probably know this theory - when planets move they make some sound which feels like the most beautiful music. Unfortunately people lost the capability of hearing that. But hey, if you step on some spiritual path then maybe eventually you will hear it again. And you may want to write it down but in the way so those other simpletons couldn't read it.
  
  But no, I actually don't believe it. And I feel that the "music theory" is one of these things that are practically impossible to prove or disprove.
  
  I guess we could assign some music notes to Voynichese symbols in a systematic way. Would it produce "nice" music, following all these theoretical rules of musical harmony? I haven't checked but I suppose not.
  
  And what if we end with some "ugly" music, a kind of medieval charivari ( You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. ) ? Could it be the solution? Probably not but try to definitely prove that it isn't.

   
  I don’t think the Voynich is a musical score or anything like that. I think the Voynich was deciphered using some kind of musical algorithm.

  (Yesterday, 12:22 PM)DONJCH Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.[quote="nintus" pid='84013' dateline='1778517346']
  
  This could be a fruitful avenue.
  A few years back somebody did a statistical analysis that arranged related vords and showed that they tended to rise to a crescendo of complexity then subside again. iirc there was more than one series. The behaviour seemed to be music-like.
  I don't know enough about music of any sort to judge and I don't remember enough to find the thread again.
  Maybe some of the leading researchers here still remember this.

  Thank you for commenting on my post. I’m interested in finding some jobs similar to mine, but I’ve never been able to find any. Would you happen to remember anything about what you mentioned?
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