5 Easter Eggs Hidden in Songs’ Musical Scores
A Russian musician is traveling on a train, reading a page of sheet music. A passenger mistakes the strange symbols for some coded message and tells the conductor, who has the musician arrested at the station. “But it’s just a concerto by Tchaikovsky!” insists the musician, as he’s dragged away.
A few hours later, an interrogator enters the cell. “You better just talk right now,” he tells the musician. “Tchaikovsky’s already given you up.”
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The above joke is at least 70 years old. It predates various changes in American-Russian relations. But maybe the central concept, about mistaking music for a secret code, was never worth mocking. Some songs really do have secrets written into them.
Twin Peaks
The main piece of music that plays throughout Twin Peaks is “Laura Palmer’s Theme.”
If you were to write the tune out using traditional sheet music, so you can play it yourself, it would look something like this:
When we want a synthesizer to play a tune, however, or a computer that acts as a synthesizer, we pump the data through a cable using a standard called Musical Instrument Digital Interface. You might best know MIDI through old video game music, or through music that merely tries to take on the sound of old video game music.
If we display “Laura Palmer’s Theme” using MIDI notation, it looks like this:
It rises and falls, then it again rises and falls. The music forms twin peaks. That would be interesting enough if composer Angelo Badalamenti wrote the tune with that in mind. But he didn’t. No one intended it — it just happened.
When music supervisor Dean Hurley saw the MIDI notation laid out and realized what it looked like, he showed it to David Lynch, who identified it as twin peaks but didn’t understand what he was looking it. Then Hurley explained that this was Laura’s theme, and that no one had planned for it to look this way. “It’s cosmic!” said Lynch now. “It’s cosmic! It’s cosmic!”
Then, after a pause, he said, “That would make a great T-shirt.” All artists are driven by these two instincts.
Mission: Impossible
The “Theme from Mission: Impossible,” which you’ve heard in every movie in the franchise, began in 1967 as part of the Mission: Impossible TV show. It unsettled listeners due to its unusual 5/4 time signature, which some movie versions reproduced faithfully while others hammered down into the conventional 4/4 signature that most pop music has.
The theme starts with two long notes, followed by two short notes. In Morse code, two long tones (two dashes) represent the letter M, while two short tones (two dots) represent the letter I. The music is spelling out M:I, in classic spy code. Also, the record label that originally released the piece was named Dot, which should have clued everyone in on the secret.
Much like with Twin Peaks, this would be fascinating enough if it were intentional. But we don’t have a single record of composer Lalo Schifrin saying that he did intend this. If it was unintentional, we no longer know who first noticed it. Perhaps they were hunted down in an ineffectual attempt to silence them.
The SMS Tone
More code also pops up in the tone that Nokia introduced decades ago to let you know when you receive a text. It’s three short beeps, followed by two long beeps and then followed by three short beeps again. Thanks to Mission: Impossible, you know that two long dashes mean “M,” and as for three dots, that’s “S.” The tone spells “SMS.”
Even if you aren’t terribly fluent in Morse, you might know that three dots, three dashes and three dots spell out “SOS.” “SMS” is just one dash away from that.
That’s one of the tones you could assign to play when you get an SMS, anyway. You could also pick the much longer tone below that Nokia named “Ascending,” or you could also set this as your ringtone. This one has no clear melody and is such a long string of dots and dashes that we’re not even going to reproduce them all here. But if you decode that from Morse, you get the Nokia slogan — “Connecting people.”
High Voltage
AC/DC have recorded around 200 songs. So, here’s a question: Have they ever done a song that includes the chords A, then C, then D, then C?
Maybe they would have ended up making some tune like that, just thanks to how probability works. But instead of waiting for that to happen on its own, they said to themselves, “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if we slipped our name into chords” back in 1975, when they were practically brand-new. The result was “High Voltage”:
The title “High Voltage,” you’ll notice, refers to electricity, which makes it yet another reference to AC/DC. The band took their name from seeing the symbol for alternating current to direct current conversion on a sewing machine. Sewing machines might not sound very metal, but they’re literally made of metal, and also feature needles.
The ‘Doom’ Soundtrack
If you were a paranoid parent from three decades ago, we’d be dedicating this entire article to explaining how all the hidden messages in music are Satanic. “If you play this AC/DC song backwards,” we’d say, “it says, ‘Hail Satan!’” We’d be lying; actually, the song just contained chords spelling out the band’s own name.
Unless, that is, we’re talking about the soundtrack to the 2016 Doom game. Below is the track from that game called “Cyberdemon.” The Cyberdemon, of course, is an especially huge monster in Doom, which got that name because the game where it first appeared came out in 1993.
If you throw that music into a spectrogram, which visualizes audio signals, you’ll see a bunch of lines of varying heights, to represent the signal’s changing amplitude. You’ll also see the lines forming layers, The lines in the rear layer form pentagrams — as well as the number 666.
Of course, this doesn’t make the actual game Satanic. Your task in the game is to kill these demons. On the other hand, Doom 2016 revises the Doom canon to say that we invaded the demon homeland to mine it for energy reserves, so maybe this game is pro-Satan propaganda after all.
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