Musical Steggy
Musical Steggy is a web app that performs music steganography, hiding text in music. The entered text is transformed into musical notes that accompany the lullaby "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star".
Created on 26th June 2022
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Musical Steggy
Musical Steggy is a web app that performs music steganography, hiding text in music. The entered text is transformed into musical notes that accompany the lullaby "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star".
The problem Musical Steggy solves
Inspiration
Steganography is the practice of hiding secrets within ordinary files in order to avoid detection. Typically, image files are used within which several pixels are changed, indiscernible to the human eye. What sparked our interest was exploring the idea of hiding messages within music. The concept is to integrate characters within the notes on a sheet of music so that when the average listener hears the piece they would be none the wiser of the scheme going on.
What it does
Steggy is a stegosaurus, and he's good at keeping secrets. Whisper to him any information and he'll keep his promise! The website allows users to type in a message into a form, upon which they can submit and download a MusicXML file containing the music with their information hidden within. MusicXML is the standard for digital sheet music and can be used with software such as MuseScore to view or play the file. For simplicity, we chose to hide the given text within a composition of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.
Challenges we ran into
The primary challenge was figuring out how to map characters to music notes, and how to incorporate them into a piece of music without sounding disjoint, as that would make it far too obvious something was amiss. In the same scope, it would not be ideal to have the length or complexity of the music correspond to the length or complexity of the text. Choosing Twinkle Twinkle Little Stars as the piece to build off of was incredibly limiting, as the song only has 12 bars. It was very cumbersome to devise a scheme to satisfy all these requirements.
Another challenge (for our eyes) would be reading raw MusicXML files
Technologies used