This puzzle has nothing to do with cryptograms. Rather, the key
words in the flavortext are "keyboard" and "composer" of the New
World Symphony. The composer is Dvorak, and there is a Dvorak keyboard
layout, so we should consider that layout.
Upon mapping the Dvorak keyboard layout and seeing what these keys are,
there is confirmation we're on the right track because the keys
pressed are very close together. In each of the lines, at most two
rows of keys are pressed. This helps lead to the aha: The Dvorak
keyboard is being treated like a piano keyboard. For instance, if
the key I were middle C, then F would be C#, D would be D, G would be
D#, and so on.
However, we still don't know what song is being played, and there is
no good way to determine the offset of each piece. However, since
the flavortext mentions the New World Symphony, we should probably
look into that. It turns out that each line of ciphertext plays
a theme within one of the four movements of the New World Symphony.
Each word represents a measure within the movement. This lets us
determine the keyboard offset of each movement, and which movement
each ciphertext line refers to:
Movement | Ciphertext | Notes |
---|---|---|
I | HDHU IUIO EOEUI U | EDEB CBCG AGABC B |
II | MNNMDI DMNMD MNNMDI DMDII | FBbBbFEbDb EbFAbFEb FBbBbFEbDb EbFEbDbDb |
III | HHH EEHHH EEYD IYEIH IYE | BBB EEBBB EEF#A GF#EGB GF#E |
IV | DCT CDD DIEI DD DCT CDD DTDTSE D | EF#G F#EE EDBD EE EF#G F#EE EGEGBB E |
The original idea for this puzzle was called These Are Not Namystics,
and the puzzle was a bunch of musical namystics (over a chromatic octave)
that played pop songs. I scrapped it because 1) I don't know pop music,
2) songs repeat the same notes too often, and 3) I think this would be even
less fun to solve than regular namystics.
Afterwards, the final extraction to the puzzle involved a musical cryptogram,
which was a nice tie-in to the name of the puzzle, but had to get dropped
because it seemed too hard to find.