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Musical Jugs, Episode 11: Quern

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Musical Jugs stays on Crossing Island, at the table with the fire bowl on top and round stands for jugs around it. A chart on a wall and a horn set in a door turn it into a tune puzzle, and Basket spends the whole video putting jugs in order by sound. The video ends with the door still shut and the tune not found.

A tune for the door

"This thing over here is important." The jugs go onto the stands around the table, and the commentary puts it together: "It's a code. You have to put them in a certain code and then this thing is listening." The thing listening is a horn set into a wooden door nearby.

Close view of a pale wooden door with a round metal fitting holding a short brass horn that opens outward, set beside a wooden post

"And the code is in the wall." On a wall of the lab is a chart of lines with a zigzag running through dots at five heights. The commentary reads it out as "dot, a little bit higher, real low, real high," then "real low," and starts from the idea that a bigger jug sounds lower.

A round wooden room with a plank floor and rope rail, colored bottles glowing on a table, and on the far wall a chart of horizontal lines with a zigzag line joining dots at different heights

Swapping by ear

The jugs have "different weird sizes," so size alone doesn't settle it. Basket swaps them between stands again and again, listening each time: "I need to swap the first two, at least." "Last one's really really wrong." About eight minutes in, "It seems promising," but the door doesn't open. A walk out to the door, into the lab and down the path finds nothing else to use ("No, this is just the boat"). "I'm not a music person."

Two at a time

Then a new plan: "I could start over and I could just put down two bottles and then see sort of the order." The commentary names the five by shape (the big fat one, the slender one, one with a small neck and a big bottom, one more like a flask, and a curving-in bottle) and gives them letters A to E. Comparing them two at a time on the stands, C turns out to be the lowest, so it goes in the middle. A is next lowest, B is the highest and goes in position 4, and the last two are swapped into place. "Okay, this should do it."

A dark pipe coming out of the rock ends in a long wooden mouthpiece pointed at the neck of a striped jug on a round stand beside a wooden table, with an empty round stand below

Where it ends

The door stays shut. Basket swaps the last and third jugs, then puts them back the way they were at first, "even though they didn't solve it." Maybe "there's actually something else I have to do along with this," the commentary says, but "once I have the right code it will just open. I think this whole door will open and it looks like there's stuff behind there." The stream ends at the jug table, with the tune still unsolved.

A wooden table against a rock wall with glowing orange crystals in a bowl on top and striped clay jugs on round stands around it, a pipe reaching in from the right