Puzzle/Trap Creation Involving Music

[plaugebearer]

I was tasked with creating a room that contained either a Puzzle or a Trap that had something to do with Music. This idea will be used against a group of 5 level 15's none of which have any ranks in perform and obviously none are a bard. But I can not think of something other than like a simon says style game on a piano that once you reach a certain mark opens the secret door. Problem is what happens if the groups just destroys the piano. So I was hoping someone here would have a better idea.

[BloodyMartian]

Is there any background/context to this challenge? Is it in the tomb of the king? A famous musician? Would solving the puzzle open a door or lower a bridge? Maybe it dispels a magic barrier? What else is going on?

[Bullet06320]

it brings to mind Goonies, with the pipe organ lowering the drawbridge with the proper notes, dropping a section of the floor with the wrong notes
perform can be done untrained
make it a little more challenging having the song written in a language no one has or in code requiring decoding or translating, and of course they would have to find the proper song, in the movie it was notes on the edge of the map

[NichG]

'You enter a spacious room hewn from a pearlescent amber stone. The ceiling is carved in the form of a twisting spiral that disappears up into darkness, though about a hundred feet up you can see a faint light shining through an open doorway. Immediately as you enter, you notice something strange about the echoes in here - the sound of your footsteps seems to bounce around the room, getting louder and louder rather than softer and softer, until there is a constant level hum set up through the entire chamber. High up in the spiral of the ceiling, you see the sound flash into waves of distortion, obscuring the doorway. As your gear clinks, the pitch of the hum in the room suddenly changes to match the pure tone, and you can see the distortion coalesce in places to form what appear to be an incomplete spiral staircase.'

How this room works - the entire spiral focuses sound and creates a region of constant sonic damage (1d6 per 'segment' you pass through, or more depending on how harsh you want failure to be). However, pure tones only resonate with particular cavities within the spiral, causing that sonic energy to be condensed down into a solid step. Because of the weird amplification properties of the material the room is made of, a pure tone will suppress other discordant tones and render them into noise (basically a very non-linear amplifier). The only resonant tones that can coexist with eachother at a given time correspond to musical chords (major and minor to keep it simple).

Draw for the party the vertical extent of the spiral ceiling as a line. Every step of the stairway is a semitone. In order to get up through the spiral (aside from teleportation), you need to sound out a sequence of chords (have the party sing, basically) such that they traverse an entire octave from note to adjacent note. Since it takes time for the destructive field to build back up, the party can move to adjacent stairs when switching chords without problem - but you need to be sure to establish this very clearly or the puzzle is unsolvable.

As stated, aside from being somewhat complex, the puzzle is pretty easy and mostly memory-based - basically just list off a progression of chords involving each semitone in order, with the ability of the party to experiment ahead of time before committing to the sequence. It can also be solved by Silence+Fly.

Given the lack of bards, I would not make this puzzle actually require Perform(Sing). You can make the argument for chords that with chords, everyone can tell if they're out of tune more-so than trying to sing dissonant combinations, so even untrained singers have a chance of pulling it off.

To ramp up the difficulty, include a fight along-side the puzzle with enemies on the landing above who make ranged attacks or have their own singers.