Written by Herman Chau, Christoper Reyes, Margaret Sands, Jacqui Fashimpaur, and Steven Silverman
Answer: PACE
In this puzzle, we’re given five sound files and five sets of music notes. Listening to the sound files, we can tell that they’re the karaoke versions of songs, but the audio for each has been altered somehow. After a few careful listens, we can identify the songs and mark down what audio transformation has been applied:
| Song | Performed by | Transformation |
|---|---|---|
| My Favorite Things | Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music | Played backwards |
| Royals | Lorde | Low Pass Filtering |
| We Didn’t Start the Fire | Billy Joel | Linear pitch increase |
| What a Wonderful World | Louis Armstrong | Only playing the right channel |
| White Woman’s Instagram | Bo Burnham | Removed every even beat |
This puzzle is entangled with Souvenir Photos. In that puzzle, we matched each song to one of the images. If we take a closer look (and maybe zoom out), we can see that they’re low-resolution versions of popular album covers, and sorted in Souvenir Photos by release year.
If we aren’t familiar with this topic, searching “famous album covers” will show most of these in top images and articles. Picking up on the shared genre and searching “popular rock albums” will also help unearth some of these, like Appetite for Destruction.
| Image | Album | Year |
|---|---|---|
 | The Velvet Underground & Nico by The Velvet Underground and Nico | 1967 |
 | Abbey Road by The Beatles | 1969 |
 | The Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd | 1973 |
 | Appetite for Destruction by Guns N’ Roses | 1987 |
 | American Idiot by Green Day | 2004 |
We now have our transformed songs and our album titles, but we haven’t made use of the music notes yet. Their enumerations are strange, and none of our information lines up with them in their current state. However, if we consider the transformations applied to our audio files and translate them over to how they would apply to text, we can do those same transformations on our album titles. The transformed titles, when sorted alphabetically, match the enumerations seen in the music notes. We can identify which transformation applies to which album by checking against the enumerations, or by using the same matching as Souvenir Photos.
| Song | Audio Transformation | Text Transformation | Album Title | Transformed Title |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| We Didn’t Start the Fire | Linear pitch increase | Start normal, then Caesar-shift subsequent letters, increasing by 1 each time | American Idiot | ANGUMHGU QMSZF |
| My Favorite Things | Played backwards | Reverse the string | Abbey Road | DAOR YEBBA |
| What a Wonderful World | Only playing the right channel | Delete the first half of the string | The Dark Side of the Moon | E OF THE MOON |
| Royals | Low Pass Filtering | Only keep letters with descenders, or “low notes” | Appetite for Destruction | PP |
| White Woman’s Instagram | Removed every even beat | Remove every even non-space character | The Velvet Underground & Nico | TE EVT NEGON & IO |
Taking the letters corresponding to the numbered blue notes in order, we get the cluephrase TEMPO OR STEP. Another word for tempo or step is our final answer, PACE.
Author's Notes
Herman: Part of the inspiration for this puzzle was the meme Megalovania But Beats 2 and 4 Swapped. Unfortunately, we weren't able to fit in Megalovania when we decided on using list songs.