GC SF Sp WH BV YL BT CP SA CB CC Back to puzzle

Cascade Bay

best song ev-er!

by Charlie Graham, Justin Graham, Yar Woo
Answer: JAZZ ORCHESTRA

We couldn’t do a Disney-like amusement park hunt without an annoying repetitive It’s A Small World, puzzle, could we? (Well we probably could have, hmm…) In any case, we wanted to make a puzzle that gave the same feeling as going on the It’s A Small World ride—requiring you to hear the same annoying verse over and over again to solve it. This particular puzzle consisted of an audio wav file that played It’s A Small World multiple times with some sections amplified. It consisted of multiple layers.

Layer 1: Syllables

If you listen to the audio, specific syllables in the chorus are amplified. Doing simple math will also show that each chorus (It’s a small world after all (3 times) + It’s a small small world) has exactly 26 syllables. To get your first message, figure out which syllable in each chorus is amplified and take the nth letter. (I.e. if the first reference to “all” is amplified, you’d be looking at the 7th letter or G). Doing this will get you the phrase: LEAST SIG BIT JPG

Layer 2: Least Significant Bit Steganography

The phrase LEAST SIG BIT JPG tells you that a jpg file is hidden in this audio wav file and you can get it out using the least bit significant algorithm. You can read more about the algorithm here: https://medium.com/@sumit.arora/audio-steganography-the-art-of-hiding-secrets-within-earshot-part-2-of-2-c76b1be719b3 . You can also download a python program to decode the file here: https://github.com/ragibson/Steganography . When you grab the Least Bits and put them into jpg file you end up with the following:

[screen shot of dialog box]

Layer 3: Frequency-modulation Steganography

The picture shows a nyquist prompt dialog which appears in the Audacity program.

The command is indicating that a separate audio track is hidden in near-hypersound frequencies using frequency modulation steganography. To extract the hidden audio, load and select the wav file into Audacity and type that command into the Nyquist prompt.

When you do so, you will hear another verse of It’s A Small World, with another set of syllables amplified. Decode the syllables the same way you did in step one to get the answer JAZZ ORCHESTRA.