Musical Monstrosity ARG
The Musical Monstrosity ARG (Alternate Reality Game) was an event that took place on June 30th, 2022. It was first revealed in the Blogpost "Musical Monstrosity" written by Dave BruBot. This ARG was the 1st of 3 small ARGs that took place prior to the v1.3.0 ARG, the other two being the Revving Up ARG and the Crossword Conundrum ARG. Attached in this Blogpost was an image of a torn music sheet. This ARG was solved using only the music sheet image provided and did not require any in-game interactions. The discussion involving this ARG took place in the official Corporate Clash Discord server and was ultimately solved in around 4 hours.
Overview
The image shows a music sheet with a time signature of 26/7 with the notes in the key of C Major. The curly brace with the letter "P" indicates this music is for the piano. The first set of notes are in the treble clef while the bottom set is in the bass clef. The treble clef is for high pitched notes while the bass is for lower pitched notes. On the treble clef, notes that land on a line are labelled in the order "E G B G F", starting from the bottom of the scale to the top. Meaning a note sitting on the bottom-most line is called an E note. The notes on the spaces are in the order "F A C E", listed the same way. For bass clef, the notes on the lines are in the order "G B D F A" and the ones on the spaces are ordered "A C E G".
The notes listed on the treble clef are B-B-F-D-G-E-F-E, while the few notes on the bass clef are D-G-C. All of the notes on the treble clef are quarter notes, while the notes on the bass clef are a whole note and two half notes. The "dots" listed next to each note indicates the amount of time it needs to be played. For each dot, the note adds the value of the next fastest note. To put in perspective, a whole note with a dot would mean that this note should play for the duration of a whole note and a half note. The numbers written in parentheses above the bass clef notes are to indicate that the note has been played for that number of times already.
Solution
To begin, there are 11 notes in the image, the same amount of unique characters attached at the end of a Youtube URL. Teasing things through hidden Youtube videos has been done in the past, so it was not unlikely for that to be the same case here. The notes are the focal point of this puzzle as the time signature of "26/7" is an irregular, and impossible to play, time signature. Time signatures are notations to show the rhythmic structure of a piece. The top number is the number of beats in each measure, while the lower one tells what type of note equals one beat. So, a time signature of "2/4" would mean there are 2 beats for one each measure and it is counting in 1/4th notes. Typically, a time signature has a denominator with the power of 2 (n^2), with the nominator being equal to or less than the denominator. However, despite its impossibility, this time signature is still significant. With every note being assigned a letter in musical scales, the alphabet comes to mind, containing 26 characters total. The same number listed in the time signature, so the alphabet must be incorporated in some way.
Before looking any deeper, it is important to first to understand the notes on the image completely. Note that the scale is said to be in C Major. This determines what letter each note will be labelled as with the C Major scale being C-D-E-F-G-A-B. Now, using this to create an "alphabet", C would be the 1st letter, D would be the 2nd letter, and so on. Going back to the 7 listed in the time signature, there are more than 7 notes (whether you are counting in total or for each measure) listed. Meaning they must be used for something else. The only other part of the image with significance to the notes (that is listed on both clefs) would be the dots that are marked by some of the notes. These dots normally indicate an addition to the current note. If we consider the "7" as an additional value, we can add it to the numbers of the "C Major Alphabet". For example, the first note listed is a B, or the 7th letter in the alphabet. It has 2 dots, equaling 14 (7+7). Add 14 to 7 and you will get the number 21. Continue this for the entire sheet:
21-7-11-16-26-3-4-17-2-12-1
Now, these numbers need to be translated back into letters with their new values. This can be done by using the A1Z26 cipher, an encoder/decoder for translating numbers/letters into letters/numbers based on the alphabet (A = 1, B = 2, etc.). The final result should decrypt to: ugkpzcdqbla
However, with Youtube URLs, the numbers need to be capitalized a certain way to correctly create a unique URL. Returning to the image, there are lowercase and uppercase letter P's on the side of the music. This implies the notes listed using the treble clef are to be capitalized, while the notes using the bass clef should be lowercase. With this discovery, only one thing remains unused in the image, which are the numbers above each bass clef note. These numbers can be used to determine the location the bass clef notes need to be placed in the URL. So "b" (the first note) should be the 2nd letter in the series of letters. Therefore creating the final result of: UbGlaKPZCDQ
This series of letters can be attached to the end of the Youtube URL "youtube.com/watch?v=" (the standard URL for Youtube videos) to reveal an unlisted Youtube video from the Corporate Clash channel. In this video, was a teaser for the upcoming v1.3.0 update, revealing the music for the Major Player's lobby, as well as a small look at its appearance.
Trivia
- The release of this Blogpost was the first look at the Major Player prior to his release in v1.3.0.
- This was also a first look at the updated buff Cog model.