List of Things Accomplished & Tried
(Adapted from
this
reddit thread. Some of these have been discussed further or have
possibly been tentatively dismissed on other threads.)
(This may not be exhaustive or up-to-date!)
Successful ideas
- Combining frames into composites
(this began with ♐RELOCK and has been
subsequently applied to most videos)
- Creating 3D Composites from the
composites. The clearest example is with
BREADTH, it is unclear whether any others are
meant to be viewed this way.
- digging through recordings on wax cylinder and 78 rpm records to identify the song in
♐RETIO. UPDATE: The song has tentatively
been identified as the 1922 recording of “Away Down East In Maine”
by Miss Patricola with the Virginians.
- efforts have been made to reverse engineer the videos, or to
understand the process by building new videos “from the ground up”.
Statitical analysis
Needing further investigation
Below is a short list of things that have been tried/discussed, feel
free to revisit these or use them as a starting point.
- creating XOR composites (such
as was done with ♐FOND)
- finding a common method of pitch shifting and/or speeding up/slowing
down videos (so far this hasn’t shown any interesting results, but
isn’t something that should be ruled out)
- discovering if images are viable as Piet Code. Piet is a graphical programming language.
It uses images that are vaguely similar to UFSC images. An effort was made
to run ♐DELOCK as Piet, but it didn’t go too
far
- analysis of frame durations was done
on ♐DELOCK.
- furthering work with bulk transcription
of the audio (such as was done with ♐BRILL) and
finding ways to analyze the results
- finding if composites or other images could be related to 4D color barcodes
used for high capacity data encoding and decoding
- analyzing audio for encoded data streams
(such as FSK)
- investigating further if ♐BRILL is related to
Brill tagging or the Brill Building Sound
- analyzing anagrams: there have been many threads on anagrams, with
no substantial results
- working to discover the very meaning of the phrase Unfavorable
Semicircle
- analyzing ♐CAB videos (for .cab files)
or embedded audible binary
- applying further analysis to the composites to confirm if they are
indeed different images of the same thing (possibly at different
zoom levels)
- interpreting the message in ♐CREM
- analyzing existing data to confirm the linkages between them.
(i.e. how, precisely do the short and long
♐BRILL videos relate? Are they the same frames
repackaged? Are ♐BRILL and
♐BRINE similarly related?)
- reverse-engineering the process used to create the distortion and
other audio effects in the UFSC videos; finding if there is a reason
for the use of DC offset and other
unorthodox audio engineering techniques
- figuring out how deliberate encoding errors (found in
♐LIMIT and many more videos) are being
introduced to the videos
- It has been demonstrated that the ♐DEPTH videos
contain 100 discrete sounds, and they seem to be sounds recycled
from other videos. Further analysis is needed to find out more about
these sounds: can they be assembled into one continuous message? Is
the use of 100 pieces a sign of a code or hidden puzzle?
- ♐FOND videos are listed on youtube with a length
of 27:45. But they play as video (and open in Audacity) with a
length of 23:45. Do these videos have three “hidden” minutes like in
♐LIMIT?
- Some videos appear to have identical sounds to previously-posted
videos when they are sped up or slowed down. (e.g.
♐LOCUS’s soundtrack transforms into data
transmission-type sounds when sped up several hundred times.) Is
this the same audio that is in other videos? What is the
significance of this?
- Verifying exactly where the Lame 3.99.5 tags on
LOVE are coming from. Checking if other videos
have them.
- Studying which dates and times UFSC uses to upload his content and
seeing if any pattern emerges
- Creating 3D composites of interesting sections of an image (like
with HARVEST).
- Layering composites of videos over each other
- Discord user Parogar found a selfie-type image (via spokeo.com) allegedly
associated with the email unfavorablesemicircle@gmail.com
- A fuller examination of Video scopes,
including other composites and vectorscopes. Integrating the more
interesting scopes into the composite overview
would also be welcome.
- Investigation into color data in SN visuals
(see Follow-up section).
- There’s a claim on the ♐LOCK article that slowing down the video 4x makes the audio easier to read as morse code. Between the size of archives and possible playbacks speeds without distoring the audio track too much (both faster and slower), that approach could be taken with a lot of videos.
- Creating composites from different pixel coordinates, such as this experiment based on the ♐LOCK keyhole heat-map.
- Creating more audio composites.
- Creating 3D composites using RYB, CMY, HSV and HSL rather than RGB.
- Create more decomposites like the one in Harvest.
- A newbie-friendly guide has been provided: https://imgur.com/a/decomposing-guide-xto0OgC
- Also: trying to recompose the decomposed layers, perhaps using different colors.
- Try to decode LOCK’s audio as GSM data:
- https://www.unfavorablesemicircle.com/LOCK#gsm
## Other ways to help
- updating this wiki (see instructions on how to contribute here)