Tìngäzìk: a Retrospective – ep. 32 “cosMo”

cosMo #vocaloid

Expected solvable difficulty

• 3samples+: experienced solvers familiar with songs of cosMo
• keywords+: most solvers

Level design

Concluding the Vocaloid series is the second last question of the game, and also the hardest one. This question comes from arguably one of the most obscure knowledge in the entire game – lyrics of cosMo’s songs. In some of his songs, cosMo puts the notes or chords of the humming parts into the lyrics, and I found it quite unique.

Aiming for the most difficult question in the game, putting the lyrics verbatim would be too easy, so I decided to trim off the “Ah” parts, keeping only the musical notes.

Ah---(G) Ah---(B♭△)
Ah---(D) Ah---(Dm7)(G7/D)
Ah---------(C)

G B♭△
D Dm7 G7/D
C

A comparison of the original and the trimmed lyrics of θθしにたがりにつけるくすりθθ.

On the answer, using the song name is not an option due to the non-ASCII characters within them, and encodings would reveal the song name too easily. Video URLs could also be confusing as the songs are spanning over a decade, and the platform uploading them varies. The next option I went for is to find a database that has a collection of all of them. Fortunately, there’s VocaDB. I put the ID of the original version of each song as the answer. Luckily, it is not hard to find the relationship between them once you have any two of the three hints: the song name, the ID, and “VocaDB”. So that I didn’t make it too hard.

However, unfortunately, after trimming off the “Ah”s, search engines seems to have a hard time figuring out what to search for, even with the characteristic “B♭△”. The only search query I manage to find working (as of Sept 2021) is "G" "B♭△" "D" "Dm7" "G7/D" "C", which featuring a search result about the song.

The songs used in the questions are:

As the second last question, I was expecting the keywords difficulty to be unlocked by then. However, the first challengers’ team was so fast that they reached this stage halfway through 3samples. As they reached out for more hints, I sent them this.

Hints included in this file are:

• Chemical System LE at the corner, and “cosMo” in the file name
  (searching for the keyword and will find that cosMo is a member of the circle Chemical System LE)
• the overall design
  (this honeycomb-like design is widely used in cosMo’s early songs)
• the timestamp (3:59 / 4:47)
• The number “5” in “ボーカロイドにオリ曲を喋ってもらった 5”
  (it is not hard to find 18-char word in a lot of his songs in the same time period, the number 5 can be used to locate the specific song)

With these information, it is then easy to locate the name of the song, and its author.

Expected thought process

Find the name of any of the 4 songs using the hints given, and using the song name and the number to find their relationships (3samples+), or using the keywords to find the relationships between the answer and the questions (keywords+).

Trivia

This question was initially set as the last question, but as the answer could potentially be brute forced, it was then moved to the second last one.