Solution: Selective Sounds Detection
Answer: DANCE
Written by Xue Heng
We start by identifying each of these famous pieces of music/songs (the enumeration might be helpful here) and, as the prompt suggests, the notes (CDEFGAB) which are present in each excerpt (note that the pieces may be transposed from the original, and there are no black keys involved):
Canon in D - ABCDEFG
Oh! Susanna - ACDEFG
Eine Kleine Nachtmusik - ABCDG
Deck the Halls - ABCDG
Edelweiss - ACDEFG
As suggested from the acronym of the title (SSD) and the flavortext having the words “seven”, “segment” and "display", we can make the intuitive leap that seven segment displays are important here. Indeed, if we translate the notes present in each of the musical excerpts into seven segment display (with a present note signifying “on” state and an absent note signifying “off” state), we get numbers:
| Title of song | Notes | SSD drawn number | Indexed Letter |
|---|---|---|---|
| Canon in D | ABCDEFG | 8 | D |
| Oh! Susanna | ACDEFG | 6 | A |
| Eine Kleine Nachtmusik | ABCDG | 3 | N |
| Deck the Halls | ABCDG | 3 | C |
| Edelweiss | ACDEFG | 6 | E |
The answer is DANCE.
Author's Notes
I originally envisioned a mechanism where each time a note is played that particular segment toggles from “off” to “on” or vice versa, but this seemed a little tedious. Moreover, it was (surprisingly) extremely difficult to find famous pieces of music which satisfy this criteria, so I settled for this version of the puzzle.
Jon: In the latest season of Taskmaster, Eine Kleine Nachtmusik was actually featured just before the hunt started!