The Wife's Notes

Question

It was a typical Sunday morning: coffee in the sun room, me and the paper, the wife and her phone. But this day as I read, I became increasingly aware of the wife’s good mood. She was humming, swaying, and tapping away on her phone like I never saw before. I’m not a nosy man but when she put her phone down and went to the kitchen to refill our cups, curiosity got the best of me. I reached over and grabbed her phone and to my utter astonishment this is what I saw:

A cold chill possessed my spine. I heard her happy humming returning so I swiftly snapped this screenshot, texted it to my own phone, and replaced her phone just in time.

And now my friends I am asking for your help. What do these notes mean? Has my wife gone completely fruity? What has been making her so happy today?

Disclaimer: original puzzle not based on a true story

UPDATE

The suspense was killing me. This afternoon I asked her.

“Hey wife,” I said.

“Hey husband,” she said.

“So the other day I glanced at your phone and it was like a bunch of fruits and stuff.”

“Lol yup. Were you able to sound them out?”

I grunted.

She laughed, “It would be very difficult, possible, but very difficult without the key.”

“The key?”


She pulled out her phone, tapped it a couple times, and shoved it into my hand.

I looked at it and saw another note with a bunch of fruit emojis.

After looking at it for a bit I asked, “So I kinda enlisted a crew of the world’s best code crackers to help me figure this out. Is it chill if I send them all a screenshot of this?”

“Of course, husband. Hopefully it makes everyone happy!”

Hopefully this will help us figure out what these fruit notes mean. But it raises a new question. Why does the wife use these emoji to represent whatever they represent?

Answer 1

Don't worry, there's nothing sinister going on here. Your wife is just happy because...

...she's humming part of Beethoven's Symphony No. 9, more commonly known as Ode to Joy.

Each of the lines of fruit emojis in the main graphic represents:

a single musical note - which makes perfect sense why she might be using the Notes app on her phone to record this!

If we use the 'key' provided in the additional information, we can make the following correspondences:

Taking the first line to represent the note 'C', we proceed downwards through D, E, F, G, A, B and finally a higher C:



Applying this to the initial screenshot gives us:



These are the notes that end the first line of the 'Ode to Joy' section of the symphony.



(In fact, if you squint you can just make out the previous 3 notes typed into the memo, faintly in the background at the top - these also all match the piece in question.)

This makes sense of the many references to your wife's 'good mood' and 'sounding out' the emojis (although not necessarily precisely why these combinations of fruit emojis are used to represent these things in this way...).

Post Script: @user39583 makes an interesting arithmetical observation in comments below to explain the use of the different combinations of emojis:

If we take [cherries]=12, [orange]=19 and [apple]=28, and add up the values of all fruit emojis in a given row, whilst interpreting the slash as a minus sign, the rows of the key add up to 36 (C), 38 (D), 40 (E), 41 (F), 43 (G), 45 (A), 47 (B) and 48 (the higher C). Each of these notes corresponds to the note's number of semitones up from the 'Contra C', with the lower of the 2 C's representing 'Middle C'.