Gallows

The significance of the Gallows characters

There are 19 gallows characters in Glen Caston’s Voyn_101 transcription:

Unlike the majority of standard VMs characters/glyphs, these are unusual in appearance and some appear to be composites of other gallows with the “c” and/or “cc” characters. My opinion is that the 2nd and 4th in the above set are the same, as are the 1st and 8th. This reduces the count to 17. An attractive proposition is that these are simply the capital letters in an alphabet of 17 letters. Indeed, the gallows characters often appear initially in the first word on a page. However, they also appear within VMs words, which is odd – unless a) the VMs words are not words at all, orb) they have been assembled unusually (e.g by anagramming).

Mapping the Voynich Manuscript to music

Using a Java Media Framework MIDI application that processes the Voynich text, each character is mapped to a note on the MIDI scale in a two octave range: Note = 48 + i mod 24

Each word is played as one or more chords of these notes, using the Grand Piano instrument.

If a gallows character (“h” or “k”) appears in the word, then the notes preceding the gallows character are played as a chord, followed shortly by the notes after the gallows character, but shifted by either 1 octave (“h”) or two octaves (“k”). If the character “9” appears as the last in the word, then the delay before playing the next word is reduced.

Using this method, here is what the common Voynich word “8am” sounds like: 8am

The word “okoe”: okoe

The word “4ohc89”: 4ohc89

And the complete Folio f1r (a long pause is taken after each paragraph on the folio): Folio f1r

And Folio f3r