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Some puzzles in The Witness are sound based. So you need to distinguish high and low pitch sounds, and this is just headache for me. Literally.

Thereby, I would like to someone else to do this painfull job for me, but only this part: Imagine that you have a person with big hearing problems and you need to reformulate those puzzles for them, using music notation, or text description, or pictures, things like this. Please do it with minimum amount of spoilers to the puzzles themselves.

As a matter of fact, I was able to solve puzzles, which one needs for a laser) by trial and error and what I need right now is to understand sounds from the additional (vault) puzzle.

But still, I think it would be nice to have a complete answer, which includes decoding of all sounds in the puzzles.

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    The puzzle you're trying to solve is pretty tough even for people with normal hearing. That said I don't think the puzzles can be reformulated without spoiling them. I don't think there is any graphical representation/musical notation of the sounds that wouldn't immediately give away the solution. I recently watched an interview with Jonathan Blow where he mentioned exactly that - as much as he would've liked to make these puzzles more accessible, it's impossible without spoiling them, so some people will just have to look these up and enjoy the rest of the game. Commented Mar 8, 2016 at 12:38
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    @MartinBüttner, I know, that's why I don't ask for "no spoilers", but for "minimum amount of spoilers". Even in the case the answer to my question will be basically solutions it is good to have them all in one place to do not spoil other puzzles acidentally.
    – klm123
    Commented Mar 8, 2016 at 15:26
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    At one of the interviews (GameBomb talk after release, here), Jonathan Blow mentioned that one not all the puzzles were designed to be solved by everyone, including color- and sound-based ones. That's actually the reason why you can get to endgame without having 11 lasers, but only 7. Commented Mar 23, 2016 at 9:39

1 Answer 1

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I think the most spoiler-free reformulation naturally would be spectrograms of the sound records. Since, they allow you to hear with your eyes.
I made them and checked that you can see (on spectrograms) all the patterns, which I was able (hardly) to hear (in the sounds), that means the puzzles must be solvable with my spectrograms even if you hear nothing.

Note:
1. Many puzzles becaume trivial for me once I saw the spectrograms, but some still are hard (see note#2 below). I think this is perfectly normal, since exactly the same was true in the other parts of iland: most of the puzzles where just to make sure that you understood rules correctly, not to be a challenge. Also I think this was the case for a musician, who would hear sounds.
2. Even once you figure out all the rules correctly you still may need some trial and error to make sure if you see correctly, but these are minor (much much smaller than I had to try using my ears).
3. On the spectrograms below you will see time on horisontal axis, frequency on the vertical and the color shows intensity of the sound component.

  1. The laser puzzles. In the game sounds are grouped in the infinitelly repeating sets, which are a little bit different each time, I recorded only 2 sets per puzzle, they are enough to find the solutions. The order you can solve them is fixed, so to minimize the spoilers I just give the spectrograms in this order:

1.1. S1P1 (set 1, puzzle 1)

enter image description here

1.2. S1P2

enter image description here

1.3. S1P3

enter image description here

1.4. S2P1

enter image description here

1.5. S2P2

enter image description here

1.6. S2P3

enter image description here

1.7. S2P4

enter image description here

1.8. S3P1

enter image description here

1.9. S3P2

enter image description here

1.10. S3P3

enter image description here

1.11. S3P4

enter image description here

1.12. S3P5

enter image description here

1.13. S3P6 (here I decided that 2 sets is not enough and made 4)

enter image description here

  1. The Vault puzzle. (the is the only puzzle, which is not related to the laser, so once you find it you will know that this is it). Here is hard to find a set, which you need so I just recorder 4 minutes.

    enter image description here

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    It would be great if this could be used to control controller vibration. Particularly useful for those playing on PS4.
    – Ambo100
    Commented Nov 4, 2016 at 15:00
  • For the vault puzzle, I would recommend my image (from my answer here)
    – iBug
    Commented May 14, 2019 at 5:03
  • There's also a related puzzle in the village, but there is no corresponding audio because the speaker there is broken. (If you're deaf, you might not realize that.)
    – cjm
    Commented Aug 29, 2021 at 2:46

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