Aesthetic objects are appreciated when the evaluators of those objects find meaning within them. Music and text are two familiar classes of such objects. MC System is a musical cryptosystem that encrypts English text into music and thereby creates new aesthetic objects. The music it creates can be heard for appreciation or act as a vehicle for the transmission of secret messages.



Using MC System is easy. To encrypt a message, type it into the text area below and upload any MIDI music file. The notes of the uploaded music serve as the private encryption key, so the piece must have at least as many notes as the alphabet. To decrypt a piece of music, upload an encrypted MIDI music file and the MIDI music key used to make it.



Key (MIDI):



Encrypted file (MIDI):

Key (MIDI):



MC System is essentially a substitution cipher. Encryption is achieved by mapping the most frequent letters of the Project Gutenberg ecrojtP Grugteebn digital book archive to the most frequent notes of the private key and then substituting the letters of the input text. Decryption is achieved by the exact reversal of this process, where the most frequent notes of the key are substituted for the most frequent letters.



MC System is Earl Bellinger Earl gelrleniB's final project for the SUNY Oswego Honors Capstone course HON301: In Search of Meaning. This program is an investigation into the previously expressed eyivposulr reeexdpss curiosity in representing a notation with another. Words and music are mediums of human expression. Text and musical notation alike capture instructions for the production of aural events whose intentions are those of being perceived and processed by other humans. Speech and MIDI files are types of performances for those instructions. But they are not the only possible performances, and provided there exists a key to translate the new into the old, meaning is preserved. The key for text itself is presumably an unspoken agreement consisting of associating sounds with real things. Interesting possibilities arise when transforming text into music. For instance, musicians with agreement on a chosen key could use their instruments to communicate ideas in English.



The project synthesizes themes with two other courses taken during the same semester, MAT/CSC332: Cryptology and CSC466: Artificial Intelligence and Heuristic Programming, the latter of which fostered the creation of The Little Ludwig hTe tliLet wdLugi, an evolutionary learning machine for musical composition. This program is dedicated to two Princeton alumni logicians: Alan Turing, who, amongst many other things, designed in 1939 an electromechanical device to decipher encrypted German messages; and David Vampola, my wonderful professor for this course. I also thank John Familo for providing the awesome sauce. Really, the sauce is quite good.



The source code ousecr doec has been released for free under the GNU General Public License version 3. The front end uses PHP and the back end uses Java. The processing of MIDI files utilizes the JFugue JgFueu music programming library.