“When we arrived, we were immediately pulled aside and they checked everything in our luggage until the Tampax was turned on. It was crazy,” said Goldberg, who presented the segment at the RSA Security Conference in San Francisco today. Experience and her musical codes. “With my music, they opened it up and it had some real tunes in it. If you’re not a musician, you don’t know what’s what. They went through everything page by page and handed it back.”
Goldberg said that while the code worked and Soviet officials did not confiscated their music, they did ask all four travelers about their plans during their time in the Soviet Union. “We were taken into a room and there was a big, big guy who was banging on the table and yelling at us,” recalls Goldberg, now a professor of music education at California State University, San Marcos .
Note names span the letters A through G, so they don’t provide the full alphabet of options by themselves. To create the code, Goldberg assigned the letters of the alphabet to the notes in the chromatic scale, a 12-note scale that includes chromatics (sharp and flat) to expand the possibilities. In some instances, Goldberg wrote only one register, called the treble clef. In other cases, she expanded her vocal range to be able to encode more letters, and added a bass clef to expand the scale range. These details and variations also add realism to her coded music.
For numbers, Goldberg would simply write them between the staves, and sometimes you might see chord symbols. She also added other features of composition, such as rhythm (half notes, quarter notes, eighth notes, whole notes), key signatures, tempo markers, and articulation indicators such as slurs and slurs. Most of them are meant to make the music look more legitimate, but some double as coded additions to the letters hidden in the notes. She even occasionally draws small diagrams that might be mistaken for diagrams to remind herself where meetings are or how things are delivered.
While technically someone could play the code as music, it didn’t sound like a tune and more like a cat walking on the keys of a piano.
“I picked a note to start with, and I created the alphabet from there. Once you know it, it’s easy to write. I also teach my friends passwords on the go,” Goldberg said. “We use it to get people’s addresses and other information we need to find them. We coded something there so we can pull out some information about people and their immigration efforts, and what we hope can help other people ask for Details of leaving.”
The American musicians started their work in Moscow before heading to the Georgian capital Tbilisi. There and on their next stop in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, they managed to meet members of the Phantom Orchestra, many of whom speak some English, and spent time getting to know each other, playing music together, and even giving small impromptu concerts.
