Escape Game Soundtracks: The Coded Music of Tool, Radiohead, and Messiaen

Although musicians are better associated with black leather and bad life choices than with math and cryptography, there’s a long history of musical types playing with coded messages.

Really, it shouldn’t be surprising: What is a musical score but mathematics and symbology?

Below we list three famous instances that show musicians are just as into cryptography as we are here at Krakit Vancouver Escape Game.

1. The song “Lateralus” by the band Tool

Although those of us who just jam along to the beat may not realize it, musically impressive metal songs are impressive precisely because they use complicated time signatures, which is basically complicated math. The more intricate the time signature, the more talented the musician.

It’s no surprise then that the highly capable musicians of Tool upped the game by composing the song “Lateralus” using the Fibonacci sequence. Like the Fibonacci sequence, “Lateralus” lyrics “spiral out,” and the song uses the time signatures 9/8, 9/8, and 7/8 to refer to 987, the sixteenth integer of the sequence.

2. Radiohead’s coded messages

The albums and songs of Radiohead—often called a “cerebral” band—are more than what they seem. The band leaves “Easter eggs” in all of their albums, but perhaps most interesting of all is In Rainbows from 2007. It includes multiple references to the numbers 01 and 10, which you may recognize as the digits that make up binary sequencing.

There’s plenty of theories that spin out from these 01/10 references, but perhaps most significant is that In Rainbows came out exactly 10 years after OK Computer. Believe or not, the tracks of In Rainbows and OK Computer combine together create an entirely new mega-album. You can find out more about the mega-tracklist on Diffuser <link: http://diffuser.fm/radiohead-01-and-10/>

3. Olivier Messiaen’s musical cipher

Decades before Tool and Radiohead were building codes into their rock albums, the 20th-century French composer Olivier Messiaen was putting cryptography to classical music in a very real way. Messiaen’s Méditations sur le mystère de la Sainte Trinité, a 1969 composition for organ, is actual a musical cipher, with its pitches and note lengths making up the code.


Jump into the codes and ciphers on offer at Krakit Vancouver Escape Game by booking a round in any of our four themed escape rooms: http://bookeo.com/krakit

Escape Game History: 3 Ciphers Once Considered “Unbreakable”

The Enigma Machine at the National Museum of Scotland (Photo: Nachosan CC-BY 3.0)

If there’s one thing you’ll find in every escape room you play, it’s some sort of code that you’ll have to break. We’re definitely cryptography nerds here at Krakit Vancouver Escape Game, and that’s why we’re so fascinated with the ciphers that no one has been able to solve (see here, here, and here for some of our faves).

However, eventually, every code will get cracked—it may just take several hundred years, that’s all.

Below are three ciphers that were once considered unsolvable, but no more. Cryptanalysis wins!

Enigma, created: 1918

The German electrical engineer Arthur Scherbius patented his Enigma Machine, a mechanical cipher machine, in 1918, and it was soon adopted by German military forces. What made it so famously unbreakable is that the Enigma Machine uses electrical signals to concoct a new code every time a key is pressed, so it never uses the same code twice.

You can see why it was considered uncrackable.

Nevertheless, Enigma was broken by the WWII codebreakers of Bletchley Park, headed up by Alan Turing. Though it certainly it wasn’t an easy task, that’s for sure.

Vigenère Autokey, created: 1586

While the Enigma remained unbreakable for over 30 years, it’s nothing compared to the Vigenère Autokey’s 300 years. It was so safe a code, it was even nicknamed le chiffre indéchiffrable, or “the indecipherable cipher” to us English speakers.

The Vigenère uses polyalphabetic substitution (that means it really mixes the alphabet up), which makes it easy to use but really hard to break. This is in fact the same principle Enigma would use many years later.

However, in 1855, the inventor Charles Babbage came along and solved the Vigenère cipher for the English during the Crimean War. Because Babbage didn’t publish his work, the cipher continued to be used until 1863(!), when Friedrich Kasiski published his attack, rendering the Vigenère useless.

The Alberti Cipher, created: 1467

An even older once “unbreakable” code is the Alberti Cipher. This code was created by Leon Battista Alberti, and is the oldest known polyalphabetic cipher. (Are you seeing a pattern here?) Like the Enigma and the Vigenère, the Alberti Cipher uses metal discs that rotate to create a new code with every spin.

Alberti was dead certain his cipher was unbreakable, and although it took several centuries to prove him wrong, we now know that polyalphabetic ciphers can—and will eventually—be broken.

Try your own hand at codebreaking in one of our four escape games: http://bookeo.com/krakit.

5 Cryptography-centric TV Shows to Bend Your Escape-Game-Loving Mind

The four codebreakers of The Bletchley Circle

If there’s one thing all escape game fans can agree on, it’s their love of ciphers, codes, and the amazing feeling that comes with cracking one. A few television producers out there share that feeling, too.

While only one of these shows is still on the air, luckily we live in the age of streaming! And, who knows, if we all put in the effort and get the numbers just right, they might just bring them back for encore seasons. We have the power, cryptography-loving escape room fans!

1. The Bletchley Circle (2012–14)

Yep, that Bletchley, the same one where Alan Turing and his team cracked the “unbreakable” Enigma Code in WWII. This series is set after the end of the war in the early ’50s, centering on a group of women—former Bletchley codebreakers, of course—who take the solving of complex crimes into their own hands after the police fail to get the job done.

2. Numbers (2005–10)

FBI Special Agent Don Eppes skips the wiretapping and intimidation and goes straight for the numbers to solve a variety of crimes. His secret weapon? His super math genius brother, Charles, who uses equations (yes, equations!) to help find and apprehend the criminals. Yay, math!

3. Gravity Falls (2012–16)

In this animated series, Mabel Pines (Kristin Schaal) and her brother Dipper (Jason Ritter) spend their summer at their uncle’s house running “The Mystery Shack.” (The town of Gravity Falls happens to be full of paranormal creatures, so it’s sort of necessary.) At the end of every episode, there’s a different cipher to crack, introducing kids—and kids at heart!—to the Caesar, Atbash, and Vigenère ciphers, among others.

4. Touch (2012–13)

Former reporter Martin Bohm (played by Kiefer Sutherland) realizes his young son, Jake, who has been diagnosed as autistic, is an ace when it comes to numbers and patterns. So good, in fact, that he can predict the future based on what he sees within them. Jake uses his skills to decipher a number of codes that lead to the pair saving the day, naturally.

5. The Numbers Game (2013–)

Unlike the other shows in this list, The Numbers Game isn’t a drama or cartoon, but shows how numbers work in our everyday lives. Host Jake Porway (who looks like he could be Bill Nye’s long lost son, incidentally) delves into the history of codes and other brain-melting puzzles. Get ready for some codebreaking and silly skits to keep you entertained along the way.

Get your hands on all the ciphers and codes Krakit has to offer by booking a game in one of our four themed escape rooms, steps away from Lougheed SkyTrain in Burnaby. Book here.