Solution to Baker House

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Answer: APOLLO

by Lewis Chen, Anderson Wang

Answers in this round:

ERASURE
GOOD FAT
HAM IT UP
LULLABY
SOLVABLE
TINFOIL
UNDOING

Additionally we are given an image of Baker House's famous piano drop, along with a 7×6 grid superimposed over the windows of Baker House. Our answers are too long to fit the rows of the grid, but combined with the piano theme of the meta, we might notice that every answer contains a different solfège syllable, which can be compressed into a single box. Note that the 5th syllable is SOL and not SO which compresses the 8 letter answer into 6 boxes.

A natural ordering is to use the scale starting from DO and ending at TI. We can do this as follows, which also places the square where the piano lies on the DO:

UNDOING
ERASURE
HAMITUP
GOODFAT
SOLVABLE
LULLABY
TINFOIL

The arrow on the picture pointing downward from the piano evokes the piano drop, but it also suggests the way to extract the answer. The arrow directly points at the square below the piano, and if we take each solfège syllable and read the letter under it we spell out the answer APOLLO. (TI, being the note on the bottom row, doesn't give us a letter.)

Authors’ Notes

We spent quite a while iterating with this meta. Here is a previous version of this meta which was ultimately deemed too difficult for a students meta:
BREAKTHROUGH
FANDANGO
ODES OF SOLOMON
OPTICAL ILLUSION
SMALL-MINDED
SNICKERDOODLE
STRAIT OF MALACCA