Abstract:
Music and its attributes have been used in cryptography from early days. Musical symbols and musical notes have been used as substitution cipher. The algorithms applied to musical cryptography use predefined set of notes and rules for the synthesis of musical patterns. The main task in the musical cryptography is to generate musical cryptograms which in turn are good sequence of musical patterns soothing to ear. The traditional methods used in musical cryptography limits the length of the plaintext to be encrypted. In this paper, a multiple note substitution algorithm is proposed to overcome the limitation to the number of letters in plaintext. The application of the algorithm produce cryptic message which not only hide the message as musical piece but it also reduces the chance of cipher message to be detected as cipher.

Keywords: cryptography, musical cryptography, substitution cipher, symmetric key cryptography, plaintext, cipher text.