Solution to the puzzle Cacophony

Cacophony is one of the puzzles of the Melbourne University Puzzle Hunt 2005 competition co-created by the founder of WikiLeaks, and likely organizer of the Cicada 3301 community, Julian Assange (the other author of the puzzle is James Saunderson). The puzzle was preceded by a short narrative that moved the script forward.

Glad to finally have some lighting, you pull a box of matches out of your pocket and light a candle, grabbing another handful for later. The extra lighting doesn’t help much — the passage is still mostly gray stone, cobwebs and dust. Your wanderings have got your circulation working however, and so you now devote some time to considering how to escape these cellars, and get back to tracking down the coin.

The silence of the passages is unexpectedly broken by a distant voice, the same one you heard during yesterday’s mystery, uttering a strange line.

“I, Dylan, master mixer of magnificant melodies, shall play you a song.”

A brief symphony of dissonance bursts into the space about you. It echoes back and forth, never seeming to dissipate, drumming itself into the deeper recesses of your mind. Your well-trained ear begins to make sense of it, and you pick out a clear, although not very smooth, scale running through the melody. As you listen longer, the rythmically beating notes strain your ears, and you try to get away from it, when a thundering roar cleaves the air.

You whirl your candle around into what looks like the face of a lion. Startled by the flame, it jumps back a step, glaring at you while you stand frozen in fear. Deciding that it is too late to play dead, and that you probably wouldn’t be playing for very long anyway, you turn around and sprint for your life.

You hear the footsteps of the beast right behind you, the resounding cacophony playing over and over as you run. The inertia of a large wall halts your motion. Pieces of it flake off in your hands, and as you grope around looking for a way past, you feel another object, warm and thus presumably your pursuer, crash into you. You fly through the wall, which you now realise is made of plaster, and find yourself on the stone floor of a large room.

The music has stopped, even if the ringing in your ears has not, and the monster, likely realising its own inability to fit through the human-sized hole it has just created, is nowhere to be seen. You quickly take the opportunity to grab a nearby rock and transcribe the music onto the plaster wall before you forget it.

Let's try to play these notes, one line at a time, and determine what they mean.

First line

This is an excerpt from the "Morning" suite from "Peer Gynt" by Edvard Grieg.

Second line

This is an excerpt from "O Holy Night" by Adolphe Adam.

Third line

This is an excerpt from "Jesu Joy of Man's Desiring" by Johann Sebastian Bach.

Fourth line

This is an excerpt from "Fanfare for the Common Man" by Aaron Copland.

Fifth line

This is an excerpt from "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" by Paul Dukas.

Sixth line

This is an excerpt from "Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1" by Edward Elgar.

Seventh line

This is an excerpt from "Pavane" by Gabriel Faure.

Eighth line

This is an excerpt from "Rhapsody in Blue" by George Gershwin.

Next step is to pay attention to the composers of these works: Grieg, Adam, Bach,  Copland, Dukas, Elgar, Faure, Gershwin. The first letters of their names give GABCDEFG. If these letters are interpreted as notes, they form G-Mixolydian scale. Hence the answer to the puzzle is Mixolydian.