X Talk
Each segment of the video has a noisy image and noisy audio. The image and audio pair can be identified as sharing something in common which fits the enumeration in the corner of the image.
| Image | Audio | Commonality |
|---|---|---|
| Jazz Combo | Wombo Combo | COMBO |
| Rock subgenre | Insurance jingle mashup | PROGRESSIVE |
| Led Zeppelin IV | Independence Day theme | FOURTH |
| Calculator function | Musical inversions | INVERSE |
| West Side Story | Inside Out theme | SIDE |
Meanwhile, the noise in both the images and the audio is suspicious. The title and flavortext are suggestive of crosstalk.
Looking closer at the files in the zip file, we can see that each image is 420x420 grayscale, and each audio segment is 4 seconds at 44100Hz. Each of these has 176400 samples (and each sample is represented by a byte in both mediums).
We need to convert the images to audio and vice versa. To do this, we treat the images as a progressive scan. (If the 5 commonality words are obtained by this point, they vaguely hint at the converting to get the inverse sides, but the conversion step is attainable even before the identifying all the initial given data.)
By treating the 2D images as an audio signal scanning across each row in order, we get 5 new audio clips. (Here is an example script.) Likewise, by taking the 1D audio signals and shaping them into a 420x420 square, we get new images. These crosstalk image/audio pairs work in the same way and we can find a commonality between each pair.
| Crosstalked image | Crosstalked audio | Commonality |
|---|---|---|
| Kaplan | Francis Scott Key (Star-Spangled Banner) | TURBINE |
| Love Letter | ”seven” (Taylor Swift) | COUNTESS |
| ”One Last Time” ( Hamilton ) | Land Before Time theme | TIME |
| Composers grouped by music period | "I Love You, Period” (Dan Baird) | PERIOD |
| Pink Floyd | “Let's Get Down to Business” (Mulan) | THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON |
The new images additionally each have a rebus clue with two blanks. We can fill in the blanks for the two commonalities associated with that pair and get a new word.
| Original Pair | Crosstalked Pair | Rebus Result | Rebus Explanation |
|---|---|---|---|
| COMBO | TURBINE | COMBINE | Cross COMBO and TURBINE at the B |
| PROGRESSIVE | COUNTESS | TWO | COUNT of ESS (the letter S) in PROGRESSIVE |
| FOURTH | TIME | DIMENSION | TIME is the FOURTH DIMENSION |
| INVERSE | PERIOD | FREQUENCY | FREQUENCY is the INVERSE of PERIOD |
| SIDE | THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON | TRANSFORM | DARK OF THE MOON (without SIDE) is a TRANSFORMERS movie |
We get an instruction: COMBINE TWO DIMENSION FREQUENCY TRANSFORM. This tells us to apply a fourier transform to the 2D medium, the images. This can be done with code or online: http://bigwww.epfl.ch/demo/ip/demos/FFT/ or https://ejectamenta.com/imaging-experiments/fourifier/.
The 2D Fourier transform of each of the crosstalked images is an image with a mostly black square in the corner with bits of white. If we combine all 5 images (by taking the brightest, the average, or the sum -- any should work), we get an image of an UPRIGHT PIANO. Because parts of answers in this subround turn into arrows, this becomes ↗PIANO.
