Tìngäzìk: a Retrospective – ep. 24 “Solresol”

Solresol #conlang

Expected solvable difficulty

• 1sample+: experienced solvers
• keywords+: most solvers

Level design

This question is inspired by a video of Tom Scott, A Language Made of Music, which talked about the Solresol language devised by François Sudre since 1827.

Instead of spelling out the notes in word, the question is instead formatted in a MIDI file encoded with Base64. As I did not put in my effort to learn the language, all the questions are taken from other sources, with 3 of them being taken from the video above.

• la-sol mi-mi re-mi-fa do-mi,la-sol mi-mi la-sol-re-sol re-mi.
  Never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down.
  Appeared at the end of the video, with people in the comment section explaining the sentence. (Although the translation itself is rather not a good match to the lyrics, which is why I have put 12tone and language as a hint below.)
• mi-mi-ti, sol-mi-sol-mi. 12tone.
  Name of the collaborating channel, whose name appeared in at the beginning of the video.
• sol-re-sol. language. The word sol-re-sol in Solresol means “language”.
• si-re mi-sol-re-do do-re-do-re fa-mi-do re mi-sol-la, re fa-mi-sol do-si-la re re-fa-si. All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. First line of first article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Translated by Simon Ager, found on Omniglot.

Expected thought process

Decode the MIDI file from Base64 in the question, using the sample questions to find out the Solresol language (and potentially Tom’s video). Translate, or look up in the comment section of the video, to get the answer.