A computer technician has claimed to have cracked a real Da Vinci code, by finding musical notes encoded in the masterpiece The Last Supper.
Leonardo Da Vinci left clues to a 40-second musical composition in his painting, Giovanni Maria Pala said.
Each loaf of bread in the picture represents a note, he said, which combine to sound "like a requiem".
Alessandro Vezzosi, director of Tuscany's Da Vinci museum, said the theory was "plausible".
The 15th century painting depicts Jesus' last meal with the 12 Apostles before his arrest and crucifixion.
'Emphasises passion'
Mr Pala found that by drawing the five lines of a musical staff across the painting, the loaves of bread on the table and the hands of Jesus and the Apostles could each represent a musical note.
The notes make sense musically when the resulting score is read from right to left, following Da Vinci's own writing style, Mr Pala said in his book La Musica Celata (The Hidden Music).
The result is a 40-second "hymn to God" which Mr Pala described as "like a soundtrack that emphasises the passion of Jesus".
Mr Vezzosi, director of the Museo Ideale in the painter's home town Vinci, said that while Da Vinci was noted for his paintings, sculptures and inventions, he was also a musician.
"There's always a risk of seeing something that is not there, but it's certain that the spaces (in the painting) are divided harmonically," he said.
"Where you have harmonic proportions, you can find music."
And also, an Audio File. It doesn't sound random or accidental to me.
Stuart: The only problem is, I'm losing track of which universe I'm in.
You kinda look like Jesus. With a lightsaber.- Peregrin Toker
Interesting. I just read that story and was curious what it would sound like. It seems to be a true composition. It COULD be a coincidence, but it seems intrinsically purposeful to my ear.
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This is very interesting considering the fact that the modern, five-line staff didn't come into widespread use until the 16th century. DaVinci must have been ahead of his time indeed.
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"These deadly rays will be your death!"
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Drooling Iguana wrote:This is very interesting considering the fact that the modern, five-line staff didn't come into widespread use until the 16th century. DaVinci must have been ahead of his time indeed.
The description of the "notes" sounds more like wishful thinking than research. If you look hard enough, everything has a "hidden" pattern in it.
True, but honestly, if anyone would do this? It would be Da Vinci. Damn fruitcake renaissance men, always inventing and doing things...
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I just tried this myself, taking a reasonably high-resolution image if The Last Supper into The Gimp, drawing a staff across the table, then marking where the various objects on the table fall on it. I was planning on then translating it into notes in Rosegarden but I didn't even get that far, since there are so many objects on the table that cross staff lines in such a way that it's extremely difficult to determine where the actual not should be placed, and there are large areas were it's pretty much impossible to discern individual objects.
"Stop! No one can survive these deadly rays!"
"These deadly rays will be your death!"
- Thor and Akton, Starcrash
"Before man reaches the moon your mail will be delivered within hours from New York to California, to England, to India or to Australia by guided missiles.... We stand on the threshold of rocket mail."
- Arthur Summerfield, US Postmaster General 1953 - 1961
And if we look at the stars, we also see patterns, and when we connect said stars together in lines, some of them even look like bears and crabs. Clearly, some higher being must have made certain constellations look like bears and crabs!
If you look hard enough, any random thing will look like they're nonrandom. We usually call such people conspiracy nuts or fundamentalists.
loomer wrote:True, but honestly, if anyone would do this? It would be Da Vinci. Damn fruitcake renaissance men, always inventing and doing things...
If by 'invent' you mean 'draw fanciful picture of', maybe. Da Vinci is massively overrated in the public opinion.
I've seen enough 'pattern from random noise' things to be pretty skeptical of this, particularly since using arbitrary sets of 'loaf interpreting rules' you could probably get several different tunes.
And really, the song itself doesn't sound like much. There's no rhythm to speak of and while the notes and chords themselves are all in-key there's more than enough wiggle room in the painting itself to iron out any dissonant bits.
"Stop! No one can survive these deadly rays!"
"These deadly rays will be your death!"
- Thor and Akton, Starcrash
"Before man reaches the moon your mail will be delivered within hours from New York to California, to England, to India or to Australia by guided missiles.... We stand on the threshold of rocket mail."
- Arthur Summerfield, US Postmaster General 1953 - 1961
It would be neat if playing the tune in front of the painting would conjure up a storm, which would cause the roof of the Sistine Chapel to spin rapidly, which would make the pope really angry. If anyone knew about mystical songs to make the pope angry from afar, it was Leonardo DaVinci.
But yeah, I'd like to see if it isn't possible to make songs out of pretty much any painting with enough detail.
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Careful chemical analysis has revealed that there is in fact another painting hidden under DaVinci's masterpiece. Has DaVinci truly come upon a secret code of the universe? Perhaps some form of "cheat"? What is his relationship to this mysterious entity known as "Konami"?
"It's you Americans. There's something about nipples you hate. If this were Germany, we'd be romping around naked on the stage here."
Everyone knows that the real hidden message in DaVinci's paintings is the words "This is a fake" written in felt-tip pen on the canvas that the Mona Lisa was painted on.
"Stop! No one can survive these deadly rays!"
"These deadly rays will be your death!"
- Thor and Akton, Starcrash
"Before man reaches the moon your mail will be delivered within hours from New York to California, to England, to India or to Australia by guided missiles.... We stand on the threshold of rocket mail."
- Arthur Summerfield, US Postmaster General 1953 - 1961
Drooling Iguana wrote:Everyone knows that the real hidden message in DaVinci's paintings is the words "This is a fake" written in felt-tip pen on the canvas that the Mona Lisa was painted on.
*smirks* wonder how many get that joke...
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How do you get a 41 second piece of music with a few loaves of bread?
How could anyone know at what tempo those few loaves of bread were meant to be "played"?
How could they know what key to play them in?
Having said all that, if the synthesizer used an electric guitar sample with heavy distortion instead of an organ sounding thing with lots of reverb, it would sound very cool!
Repoman wrote:How do you get a 41 second piece of music with a few loaves of bread?
How could anyone know at what tempo those few loaves of bread were meant to be "played"?
How could they know what key to play them in?
Having said all that, if the synthesizer used an electric guitar sample with heavy distortion instead of an organ sounding thing with lots of reverb, it would sound very cool!
Musical notation was very simple back then, with basically whole and double beats, with a tempo was about seventy-five.
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Drooling Iguana wrote:This is very interesting considering the fact that the modern, five-line staff didn't come into widespread use until the 16th century. DaVinci must have been ahead of his time indeed.
True, but the neumic system dates back to ~850 CE and had a 4 line staff by 1300.
It might just be noise, but it seems like the kind of thing a genius might do to keep himself amused in the late 15th century.
General Zod wrote:Careful chemical analysis has revealed that there is in fact another painting hidden under DaVinci's masterpiece. Has DaVinci truly come upon a secret code of the universe? Perhaps some form of "cheat"? What is his relationship to this mysterious entity known as "Konami"?
This just in: further chemical analysis has revealed a third painting, hidden beneath the "Konami" painting. Obviously, its location implies that it was, in fact, the original version of the painting:
Click for desktop-worthy largeness.
どうして？お前が夜に自身お触れるから。 Long ago in a distant land, I, Aku, the shape-shifting Master of Darkness, unleashed an unspeakable evil,
but a foolish samurai warrior wielding a magic sword stepped forth to oppose me. Before the final blow
was struck, I tore open a portal in time and flung him into the future, where my evil is law! Now, the fool
seeks to return to the past, and undo the future that is Aku...
-Aku, Master of Masters, Deliverer of Darkness, Shogun of Sorrow
CaptainChewbacca wrote:Edit: Screwed up the audio file link. Here it is
This...
It's...
Utterly random....
I've heard cars honk in rhythms not to dissimilar from that in the city. And I do believe I'd call that more soul-felt and beautiful.
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Drooling Iguana wrote:This is very interesting considering the fact that the modern, five-line staff didn't come into widespread use until the 16th century. DaVinci must have been ahead of his time indeed.
True, but the neumic system dates back to ~850 CE and had a 4 line staff by 1300.
It might just be noise, but it seems like the kind of thing a genius might do to keep himself amused in the late 15th century.
Mapping the objects on the table to a 4-line staff would produce a substantially different "song" than doing it on a 5-line staff would.
"Stop! No one can survive these deadly rays!"
"These deadly rays will be your death!"
- Thor and Akton, Starcrash
"Before man reaches the moon your mail will be delivered within hours from New York to California, to England, to India or to Australia by guided missiles.... We stand on the threshold of rocket mail."
- Arthur Summerfield, US Postmaster General 1953 - 1961
.