Music DE-Composition 101 Mystery Cache

Hello students! Welcome to Music DE-Composition 101. Your assignment for today is to analyze my latest composition, Invention #2, and determine the GPS coordinates for the related geocaching item. I know it may have been a while since your last music class, so first I’ll give you a little refresher on the basics of music notation.

The diagram below shows the notes in the bass and treble clefs, along with the name of each note, and it’s position on the piano keyboard. Only the “natural”, or white key, notes are shown on the music staff. You should recall that a sharp (#) in front of a note in the music raises that note to the next highest black key note (F with a “#” in front of it becomes F#), and a flat (b) lowers to the next lower black key (A with a “b” in front becomes Ab). And a "natural" symbol in front of a note indicates the "white key" note, cancelling out any previous sharp or flat for that note in the measure. Each black key therefore has two different names: it’s “sharp” name (relative to the white key to it’s left), and it’s “flat” name (relative to the white key to it’s right).

So there are twelve notes, including white and black keys, in each octave; for example, starting from A, and going up the keyboard to the next G#/Ab. Then the pattern repeats for each higher and lower octave. If we were to write the letter names for all of those notes out in a row (called a “chromatic scale”), it would look like this:

A  A# B  C  C# D  D# E  F  F# G  G# A   –> (repeat)
   Bb       Db    Eb       Gb    Ab    

Now on to our geocaching puzzle... In my composition, the notes on the treble clef can be converted to letters, which spell out one portion of the coordinates. And the notes on the bass clef provide the other portion. The measure bars (vertical lines running through both of the music staves) divide the letters into words. For example, in measure 2 there are five notes in the treble staff, so that represents a five-letter word. There are only three notes in the bass staff for that measure, so that will be a three-letter word. For this puzzle, you don’t need to be concerned about the different note durations (quarter-note, eighth-note, etc). We will save that for a future lesson.

To find the letter corresponding to each note in the composition, you will need to map the 26 letters of the alphabet (in order) to 26 notes in the chromatic scale (in order from low to high). The mapping is different for the bass and treble clef notes, and it will be up to you to determine how to do the alignment for mapping. For example, for the treble clef, if middle C corresponded to the letter “A”, then the following C#/Db would be the letter “B”, the next D note would be letter “C”, etc. For bass clef, if the low G note (bottom line of staff) was “A”, then the following G#/Ab would be “B”, the next A note would be letter “C”, etc.

Here is a link to the music for Invention #2. And here is a link to a recorded version, in case you would like to hear how it sounds. It's certainly nothing like a Bach Invention! Maybe more like Schoenberg.

You can check your answers for this puzzle on Geochecker.com.

Note: The posted diff level is assuming that you have no musical background. Musicians should find it somewhat easier than that...