A
musical cryptogram is a
cryptogrammatic sequence of
musical notes, a sequence which can be taken to refer to an extra-musical text by some 'logical' relationship, usually between note names and letters. The most common and best known examples result from composers using
ciphered versions of their own or their friends' names as
themes or
motifs in their compositions. Much rarer is the use of
music notation to
encode messages for reasons of
espionage or personal security called
steganography.