Decoding Tempo
How a Juilliard dropout used an ancient cipher to help a student speak.
In our previous article, "What is Tempo’s Alphabet?", we introduced you to Margaret Mallow. Born with perfect pitch, Margaret could identify any musical note the exact millisecond she heard it. As a kid, if someone played a C-sharp on a distant tv commercial, she could find it and play it without even looking up from her Fisher-Price toy piano. Margaret is an old soul who lives for classical music, like Bach, and holds a slight, polite contempt for modern music, with the sole exception, of course, of Taylor Swift.
After training to become a composer at Juilliard, the grueling pressure of New York City took its toll. Feeling like she had failed, Margaret made the choice to give up her dreams and return home to Dublin, Ohio, taking a job at her old middle school as a music teacher.
It was there that she met a quiet seventh grader named Tempo Templeton.
The Tape Recorder
Margaret began privately tutoring Tempo. To help him learn to speak, her very first step was to ask him to recite the entire English alphabet in his own unique way.
One afternoon, Tempo stayed after class. Margaret sat at her classroom piano, pulled out her phone, and turned on the voice recorder. She asked Tempo to say the letter "A" so she could capture the sound. To her amazement, it rang out with the distinct musical pitch of an E note.
"B," Tempo said. It sounded exactly like an A.
"C," he continued. It perfectly mirrored a D.
He kept going, letter by letter, until he reached the end of the alphabet, the letter Z. When Margaret stopped the recording, she realized every single letter Tempo recited corresponded perfectly to one of the seven foundational musical pitches: C, D, E, F, G, A, and B.
Later that evening, after settling into her house, Margaret pulled the phone from her bag. Listening to the audio file on repeat, she meticulously transcribed where each letter fell under the musical pitches, organizing them into seven distinct columns.
Candy and Code
The turning point happened the next day during lunch. Margaret sat in the teacher’s lounge, listening to Tempo’s voice on her phone through her AirPods. Spread out on the table in front of her was a notepad, covered in letters and music notes, scribbled and doodled all over. She had been trying hard to build a system, some way to sort Tempo’s speech under the seven notes that made up his spoken alphabet: C, D, E, F, G, A, B.
It was a mess.
Justin Lorgan, the math teacher, walked into the lounge just as the school janitor, Lowell, was stocking the vending machine. Justin dropped into the seat across from Margaret. He glanced at her paper, then at her face, scrunched up in concentration.
"What are you trying to do there?" he asked.
Margaret quickly slid her hand over the notepad. "Oh, nothing. Hey, what would be the easiest way to organize someone’s speech? Like, a system for it. What would you use?"
"A grid, probably," Justin said.
He told her about the Polybius square, a cipher the Greeks invented two thousand years ago. He grabbed her pen and sketched the grid right there on the page, on top of the same letters Margaret had been doodling under each of the seven notes.
"It takes the whole alphabet and arranges it so every letter can be swapped with a simple pair of coordinates," he explained.
Lowell interrupted them, offering Margaret a box of M&M’s that had gotten a little banged up in the delivery box from the vending machine company during shipping. He knew they were Tempo's favorite candy. As Margaret accepted the box, Lowell smiled. "You know, I’ve always liked that little 'M' stamped right on the candy," he mused.
That simple comment sparked an idea. Two ideas collided in Margaret’s mind at once: M&M’s, and the Polybius Square.
Lowell's comment about the branded candy combined with Justin’s grid, and Margaret’s thoughts jumped straight to a lecture her Juilliard professor once gave on musical cryptograms and the famous "Bach Motif", an old musical cryptogram where composers spelled out words using musical notes.
Suddenly, the vision for Tempo's Alphabet fell into place.
Sitting at her kitchen table at home, Margaret’s mind kept circling back to the candy, the grid, the music notes, trying to see how they all fit together. She gathered seven stacks of thick, colored construction paper she had borrowed from the art teacher’s classroom: blue, black, brown, red, green, yellow, and purple. Holding a sharpie, she traced large music notes onto the sheets.
Then, she grabbed her scissors. The blades sliced through the thick paper like butter, making a soft, rhythmic crunch... crunch... crunch. Like someone happily chewing on a handful of crispy M&M’s.
One by one, she arranged the cutouts across her kitchen table, moving them around until the notes finally lined up the way she needed. Pulling out a marker, she wrote a single letter inside each note. Bold and true. She stepped back and looked it over.
Satisfied, she pulled out her phone and snapped a photo.
Building the Board
Margaret had gotten to school early, the following morning. Working alone in her empty classroom, she gripped her music staff liner and, in a single, smooth motion, swiped it across the whiteboard, leaving behind a trail of five perfectly parallel black lines, looking for all the world like a shooting comet across the sky. She drew a sharp treble clef, at the very beginning, right next to a portrait of Johann Sebastian Bach.
Propping her phone against the chalk tray, she glanced back and forth at last night’s photo, copying each note’s shape, color, and place on the staff. Each note featured a bold letter of the alphabet stamped right in its center. Read together from start to finish, they spelled out a full name: "Tempo Templeton!"
Later, Lowell walked into the classroom to clean and stopped dead in his tracks. He stared at Margaret’s new wall creation with a bemused grin.
"That’s trippy," Lowell said. "Kinda look like giant musical M&M’s."
Lowell squinted at the whiteboard, mouthing the letters as he read them. "Tempo Templeton!" he said, finishing with a little extra gusto, like he was reading the exclamation point out loud. He examined the cipher on the whiteboard, scratching his chin, counting under his breath.
Margaret pointed to the board. "Tempo’s favorite candy is M&M’s. Figured if any colors were gonna stick with him it’d be those. So, I color-coded the letters based on the candy. C is blue, D is black, E is brown, F is red, G is green, A is yellow, and B is purple. Well, minus black and purple. I added those in myself because they fit the palette perfectly. Tempo’s never been great with notes on a page, but colors he never forgets."
Lowell nodded slowly, still studying the board. "Okay, but that’s only twenty-six letters. What are these two doing there?" he asked, tapping the exclamation point and question mark.
"Seven notes, four rows, twenty-eight cells in its checkerboard," Margaret answered without missing a beat. "To fill out the last two blank cells, I added an exclamation point and a question mark. That way, Tempo can visually illustrate his tone of voice when he’s angry or excited, or wants to ask a question, just like the rest of us do with ours."
"What if Tempo just wants to end a normal sentence with a period?" Lowell asked.
Margaret smiled, reading his mind. "The musical pause symbol, a rest, substitutes as the period," she said, placing the symbol firmly on the board.
Code to Spotlight
With the pieces finally in place, Tempo’s Alphabet was ready to be put into practice. The true test of its design came during the school's annual Christmas recital. The finale, a piece Margaret composed specifically for Tempo, was called "What Is Your Name?"
While the school choir sang softly in the background, Margaret sat at the piano, guiding Tempo through his first speech. To the parents watching, it looked like a standard school music class recital. Tempo used the speech tool she had created, and for the first time in his life, he was speaking in front of everyone. The cipher hidden in Tempo’s own voice, the one Margaret had cracked, was now filling the auditorium, note by note, as he spoke his own name: "Tempo Templeton!"
Parents sat in silence, capturing the moment on their phones. To the eye, it looked like a magic trick. From the back row, someone let out a stunned laugh. "Wait, is he really speaking music notes?" A woman beside him nodded slowly, her eyes fixed on Tempo as the children chanted, "What is your name?"
Within days, a video uploaded to a brand-new channel for Tempo exploded on YouTube. Tempo became an overnight viral sensation. The video caught the attention of producers at the hit TV talent show "American Star," resulting in an official invitation to compete on the national stage.
As Tempo’s channel began to rack up subscribers, the comment section filled with the usual flood of crying emojis and strangers tagging their friends. Oddly enough, the first comment congratulating him came from a fellow content creator on the platform known as The Spellfluencer, Saranda Dreamweaver.
"Some voices take longer to find their key."
