Artist and developer Giorgio Sancristoforo – creator of the apps Berna, Gleetchlab X and Fantastic Voyage – has introduced Decoder/Encoder, a new application designed to let you hide hidden audio messages in your songs.
Inspired by cold war spies and the Steganography of Johannes Trithemius, Encoder and Decoder are designed to let you hide simple speech messages in your music.
The system has two components:
- With Encoder, you can create an AIF audio file (48KHz or upper) mixing two files: one audible to everybody, and another one (speech) that will be only audible to your friends with the decoder app. You can distribute your 48KHz files as AIF, WAV, mp3 or embed it in a video.
- With Decoder you will be able to listen to any message hidden in music with Encoder. You will need to find the correct frequency to decode the signal with the best quality, as demonstrated in the video demo.
You can use a bat detector or ultrasound microphone to listen to the messages that you hide in your music with Encoder:
Pricing and Availability
Encoder is available now for 14.99.
Please try it with Snowblind, by Styx, I want to know the truth.
Reminds me of the movie Phantom Thread. Now we can sew in secret happy messages for our listeners.
I wonder if such feature could be used to somehow “sign” your own music and copyright protect it.
That’s a great idea.
Yes, that is a great idea.
*Decodes song*
“Clueminaaaatiiiii”
Damnit I thought this trend ended after 2000.
Not if you use lossy compression to distribute or someone can get hold of your music after lossy compression has been applied, since audio codecs typically target out of hearing range frequencies (like 20 kHz and above) to reduce file size. Your secret message will either be gone or at least distorted beyond recognition.
Interesting. That’ll make it hard to upload the secret audio to YouTube then?
I prefere to play my music backwards to send messages from the devil…
wow scary
Wait. Paul is dead?!!
They Live (1988)
It’s clever. It’s a little creepy, but it’s also something that god forbid might come in handy.
this is called “steganography”
Second paragraph of the article: “Inspired by cold war spies and the Steganography of Johannes Trithemius”
thank you fro making it uncool
I gotta admit, I like this person’s mind and projects. The other software they offer looks nice, but I left Mac a while ago… The modular playing cards look kinda fun “Pray to Stockhausen and ask for his spiritual advice” haha.
Then I saw this and now I’m intrigued: https://www.giorgiosancristoforo.net/research/