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silver0163 Posts: 3	Posted - Tue Jun 03, 2003 6:14 pm  I have heard of some songs containing barely-audible subliminal messages underneath the music and would like to know if it's true. Is there any way to isolate the messages that might be contained in a song and hear them alone?
William Rose Location: USA Posts: 467	Posted - Tue Jun 03, 2003 6:39 pm  I'm guessing no. Barely-audible means barely-audible. After all, they are subliminal. A much more thorough and technical answer will appear shortly.
ozpeter Location: Australia Posts: 3200	Posted - Tue Jun 03, 2003 8:29 pm  You mean this one?! Many years ago in the days before digital audio (yes, children, there were such days, even before Post78 was first seen on the forum), I tried a bit of subliminal audio as a party trick - using a cassette where I chanted a number beneath some music - and a surprising number of those present 'guessed' the right number. But for all the reasons why unmixing of anything doesn't work, see the infamous 'Vocal removal' sticky thread at the top of the forum. - Ozpeter
SteveG Location: United Kingdom Posts: 6695	Posted - Wed Jun 04, 2003 2:10 am  silver0163 wrote: I have heard of some songs containing barely-audible subliminal messages underneath the music and would like to know if it's true. Is there any way to isolate the messages that might be contained in a song and hear them alone? Oz is right about the 'unmixing', obviously - but there is an analytical trick that may possibly yield a more conclusive result about information contained at a low level in a track. Simply invert the dynamics of the audio to make the quiet bits loud and the loud bits quiet. (try this with the dynamics processor) The results of this vary tremendoudly - how well it works depends on a lot of different factors, and they are mainly to do with the parts of a track that are harder to hear (also obvious!), so experimentation is very much the order of the day. Attack and release times can make a big difference to this. _________________
Brad Posts: 106	Posted - Wed Jun 04, 2003 12:35 pm  Go here www.reversespeech.com for some interesting info and techniques on the subject.
ozpeter Location: Australia Posts: 3200	Posted - Wed Jun 04, 2003 4:40 pm  At a glance my first reaction was 'is this a wind-up?' - but as this phenomenon was originally discovered in Australia (or so it says), it must be ok. I shall try to read more with an open mind later - thanks for the link! - Ozpeter
mantisxf Location: USA Posts: 25	Posted - Wed Jun 04, 2003 5:25 pm  ozpeter wrote: At a glance my first reaction was 'is this a wind-up?' - but as this phenomenon was originally discovered in Australia (or so it says), it must be ok. I shall try to read more with an open mind later - thanks for the link! ahhh, yeah, i remember that guy was on art bell ( http://www.artbell.com/ ) a while ago. ahhhhh, SOMEthing happened and that guy started spreading rumors, i guess, about art as well as causing a stir on the usenet, i believe. i THINK he's the guy that posted anti-filipino stuff (masquerading as art) on a filipino newsgroup. it went round and round the world a couple times. the interesting thing is, art's wife, i BELIEVE, is filipino. anyway, long story short, i think he's the guy art sued. wow, going to that link, i just found out art retired on the 1st of january. hahaha....ok so i haven't listened to the program in a long time. :P legal disclaimer: i have a bad memory. don't sue me.
AMSG Location: Sweden Posts: 594	Posted - Wed Jun 04, 2003 5:56 pm  Bands have been accused before of putting subliminal messages on records. Does anyone know Judas Priest? Anyway, the thing is...the band won. It was proven that most subliminal messages are just in the imagination of the listener. I for one don't really believe in it actually...
jonrose Location: USA Posts: 2901	Posted - Thu Jun 05, 2003 12:22 am  ...elbisrever si cisum ehT !kcab nruT !kcab nruT !!!heh-heh _________________
post78 Location: USA Posts: 2887	Posted - Thu Jun 05, 2003 12:51 am  .daed si luaP _________________ Answer = 1. Probably.
SteveG Location: United Kingdom Posts: 6695	Posted - Thu Jun 05, 2003 1:28 am  I think that palindromes would be more fun... _________________
post78 Location: USA Posts: 2887	Posted - Thu Jun 05, 2003 1:47 am  Never odd or even. _________________ Answer = 1. Probably.
post78 Location: USA Posts: 2887	Posted - Thu Jun 05, 2003 1:51 am  Although, I suppose that audible palindromes would best work phonetically, and even then, we'd have to deal with accents... That might be more trouble than it's worth! _________________ Answer = 1. Probably.
Bobbsy Location: United Kingdom Posts: 327	Posted - Thu Jun 05, 2003 2:11 am  jonrose wrote: ...elbisrever si cisum ehT !kcab nruT !kcab nruT !!!heh-heh Elo Elo Elo, what's all this then? BTW, "tns'i emit tuB" Bob
William Rose Location: USA Posts: 467	Posted - Thu Jun 05, 2003 2:23 am  (Couldn't Resist) Are we not drawn onward, we few? Drawn onward to new era? Yawn. Madonna Fan? No damn way! Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas.
Bob K Location: USA Posts: 165	Posted - Thu Jun 05, 2003 5:57 am  Now we're getting into existentialism...when to a pragmatist, detecting messages in reversed sound bites is silly. "It's coincidence! It's a haphazard concatenation of random noise! An infinite number of monkeys on an infinite number of typewriters will eventually write a Shakespeare play...and it's irrelevant! Get over it!" _________________ Bob K Production Director, WLIF-FM, WJFK-AM Baltimore, MD
ozpeter Location: Australia Posts: 3200	Posted - Thu Jun 05, 2003 6:25 am  Ever tried the trick of recording speech or song, reversing it, re-recording it speaking/singing backwards as it now sounds, then reversing it again? Makes a weird vocal effect - you, but not the way you normally are. (Which might be an improvement). - Ozpeter
djwayne Location: USA Posts: 583	Posted - Thu Jun 05, 2003 6:58 am  While one the subject of backward recordings, Ever listen to the begining of the song "Roundabout" by YES ?? It has this sound that grows from nothing to very loud and goes into a harmonic guitar sound. The growing part of that sound is an E Minor chord played on a piano, and the recording is reversed, then blended into the harmonic guitar part. This recording was made in 1971. The whole "Fragile" album took 5 weeks, 12-18 hour long days, at a cost of $30,000 to record. $30,000 was a lot of money in 1971. Still is a lot of money.
Syntrillium M.D. Location: USA Posts: 5124	Posted - Thu Jun 05, 2003 8:58 am  djwayne wrote: $30,000 was a lot of money in 1971. Still is a lot of money. Britney Spears dinner tab for her last 'record release' was nearly 10 times that... $30k for a big-name group is peanuts today. But the sentiment is right-on. It would be nice to think that 'groups' were actually pulling 18 hours days, churning out music that would actually evolve and change things...I suppose it could happen again. :) ---Syntrillium, M.D. _________________
zemlin Location: USA Posts: 1156	Posted - Thu Jun 05, 2003 9:11 am  Then there's the little bass riff in Paul Simon's "You Can Call Me Al" - the second half is the first half reversed - not reversed by the bassist but played back in reverse. Syntrillium M.D. wrote: Britney Spears dinner tab for her last 'record release' was nearly 10 times that... Were you there ! ! _________________ Karl Zemlin - www.cheap-tracks.com Host of the World Wide Cool Edit Collaboration Procedural Debate
Syntrillium M.D. Location: USA Posts: 5124	Posted - Thu Jun 05, 2003 9:21 am  zemlin wrote: Syntrillium M.D. wrote: Britney Spears dinner tab for her last 'record release' was nearly 10 times that... Were you there ! ! ;) ---Syntrillium, M.D. _________________
AutoGhash Location: Canada Posts: 48	Posted - Thu Jun 05, 2003 9:46 am  I've always felt that backwards messages do reflect a phenomenom, but that it's in the way we listen. Like the court trials for Judas Priest. This sort of thing happens in all sorts of fields... for example, one can construe a human face inside almost any image. (I always THOUGHT that electrical outlets looked like lost souls!) One time a friend and I tried to write a whole song that sounded intelligible forwards and backwords (using sound recorder). We ended up writing a whole verse (about his sister, for some reason) that was working OK, but then we got frustrated and stopped because sound recorder only recorded 60 seconds of wave at that time... [edit: couldn't resist. An infinite number of monkeys on an infinite number of typewriters wouldn't eventually write a shakespeare play: they would do it instantly. ]
jonrose Location: USA Posts: 2901	Posted - Thu Jun 05, 2003 9:53 am  zemlin wrote: Then there's the little bass riff in Paul Simon's "You Can Call Me Al" - the second half is the first half reversed - not reversed by the bassist but played back in reverse. Ah, yes... the part played by one Baghiti Kumalo... Did you know, that guy can play it live just as it sounds on the record? He's one amazing fretless player. It makes your head spin just to watch him, sometimes.... 8) I kind of have to wonder if he's still in his home country, breaking young new talent (which is what he ultimately decided to do, years ago, instead of staying on the international scene). _________________
VoodooRadio Location: USA Posts: 3971	Posted - Thu Jun 05, 2003 10:43 am  And today trivia question is........ What group was the first to record a 1 Million dollar album and what album was it? _________________ I said Good Day! Voodoo
William Rose Location: USA Posts: 467	Posted - Thu Jun 05, 2003 11:15 am  1 Million in production costs ?
post78 Location: USA Posts: 2887	Posted - Thu Jun 05, 2003 1:31 pm  Quote: Ever tried the trick of recording speech or song, reversing it, re-recording it speaking/singing backwards as it now sounds, then reversing it again? Makes a weird vocal effect - you, but not the way you normally are. YES! I've done it before, but didn't get anything very useful out of it. I've also done it with a guitar track; played an acoustic solo, memorized it in reverse (while trying very hard to ignore the odd crescendos - more difficult than it sounds on a nylon string, which can be quite percussive if fingered with adequate force), then played it backward and reversed it "forward". Very cool, and I plan to use the trick for one of my new songs! Although, it did take me a bit of writing of the initial solo to get something that sounded good reversed... I feel much more comfortable when I can just jam out the solo, as any guitarist would. Quote: Did you know, that guy can play it live just as it sounds on the record? He's one amazing fretless player. It makes your head spin just to watch him, sometimes... I know you'd love (or perhaps already do) Tommy Kennedy. Seeing the Dave Weckl Band perform live was something that I'll never forget, including Tommy's performance. _________________ Answer = 1. Probably.
VoodooRadio Location: USA Posts: 3971	Posted - Thu Jun 05, 2003 3:44 pm  Guitarist Reeves Gabriel with David Bowie does it. Robert Fripp has done it..... in fact, it's been done to death! _________________ I said Good Day! Voodoo
ozpeter Location: Australia Posts: 3200	Posted - Thu Jun 05, 2003 4:44 pm  Of course Bach knew a thing or two about tunes that went backwards, forwards, upside down and inside out all at the same time! Or tunes which spelt names. He died just when he used the letters of his own name in a fugue for the first time (so beware!). - Ozpeter
Princeamor Location: USA Posts: 41	Posted - Thu Jun 05, 2003 9:04 pm  Umm I Used To Be Into Subliminal Messages a lot and stuff, I used to listen to a whole bunch of stuff backwards. The BIGGEST Subliminal Messages Stuff I know about is the song from Led Zepplin, Stairway To Heaven. Dont Want to Scare You But He says like A LOT of Satanic Stuff In there backwards. So U can look it up at your own umm.. Danger... There is also one that I found myself from EMINEM, In the Song "Without Me" In the Begining Where he says "... Guess whos Back...." He/They are actually Saying the word EXTACY backwards. I dont do that anymore cuz it just gives u a headache... Hehe Just be careful what u listen to Egassem Lanimilbus Siht Gnidaer Pots. _________________ Dj Luz
AMSG Location: Sweden Posts: 594	Posted - Fri Jun 06, 2003 4:42 am  But my point is this one...why use subliminal messages if you can just sing it the normal way? Then you're sure that everybody understands it, hehe:D I mean, all those people fearing those hidden messages...sheesh...if a band wants to bring forth something they can just say it as it is. And in the case of judas priest, this trial was totally ridiculous. As the band itself said: if we could've put such messages on our albums we would've said something like 'buy our records' not 'kill yourself' (which they were accused of...someone's suicide). They thought it was pretty stupid to tell your own fans to kill themselves. That means less people that buy your records of course. Anyway, the band itself went back to the studio then and listened to their records backwards to find some 'hidden messages'. They found stuff like 'mamma, can I get chocolate' or something like that. Then they played their findings in court. And guess if the people that started this whole thing made a fool out of themselves,hehe.
ozpeter Location: Australia Posts: 3200	Posted - Fri Jun 06, 2003 4:48 am  When my boy (now 25) was little, he misheard the song "You didn't have to be a heartbreaker" and used to go round singing "You didn't have to be a Darth Vader", he being heavily into Star Wars at the time. Any other 'pseudosubliminal' examples of that kind? - Ozpeter (Seeing as it's so quiet around here in the last few days)
SteveG Location: United Kingdom Posts: 6695	Posted - Fri Jun 06, 2003 6:41 am  My mother misheard the Lord's Prayer slightly as a child, and instead of saying 'For thine is the Kingdom, the Power and the Glory' she used to say 'For thine is the Kingdom, the Car and the Lorry'... and there was always that Christmas carol that used to have the line 'Most highly favoured lady' in it, which was regularly 'reinterpreted' as 'Most highly flavoured gravy' - Ahh, Bisto! (this might be lost on the rest of the world - it's a very popular brand of gravy powder in the UK. The Ahh, Bisto! bit was an extremely effective advertising campaign.) _________________
djwayne Location: USA Posts: 583	Posted - Fri Jun 06, 2003 6:53 am  In second grade, at a Catholic school, we thought it was "Hail Mary, Full of Grapes, The Lord is with Thee". I got in trouble with the Nuns over that one.
VoodooRadio Location: USA Posts: 3971	Posted - Fri Jun 06, 2003 10:39 am  My 11 years old (when he was about 5) used to regularly listen to my Elvis Costello CD's and would make up his own words using Nintendo characters. "He thought he was the king of America, but he was just a whipping boy for Mario"! :D Brilliant Mistake = Drink beer and eat steak! _________________ I said Good Day! Voodoo
AutoGhash Location: Canada Posts: 48	Posted - Fri Jun 06, 2003 1:03 pm  ozpeter wrote: Of course Bach knew a thing or two about tunes that went backwards, forwards, upside down and inside out all at the same time! Or tunes which spelt names. He died just when he used the letters of his own name in a fugue for the first time (so beware!). - Ozpeter oh, so you want to get all common-practice era on us? 8) sogetto cavato (deriving a theme from someone's name) has been around a lot longer than Bach. In fact, it's one of the earliest deliberate composition techniques. Some of the best examples I know of are by Josquin de Prez (15th century), who wrote something like 20 masses using sogetto cavato and other cantus firmus techniques. I don't think anyone ever accused him of slipping devil-messenges in there, though. Probably because most "concerned parents" couldn't read. Makes you wonder...
ozpeter Location: Australia Posts: 3200	Posted - Fri Jun 06, 2003 5:02 pm  Cantus firmus I'd come across, sogetto cavato is a new one on me. You learn something here every day. If I'd seen it on a restaurant menu I would probably have ordered a large one! - Ozpeter
fm2030 Posts: 7	Posted - Fri Jun 06, 2003 5:09 pm  A burning topic indeed! (Sorry, couldn't resist) Boards of Canada put lots of hidden stuff (including many references to David Koresh and the Branch Davidian cult) into their records. The track 'You could feel the sky' from geogaddi, for instance, has a snippet of reversed speach that says 'A God with hooves, a God with horns'. Slow it right down, and the 's's are actually the sound of a girl screaming. In fact, the sentence itself is palendromic, so the phrase is roughly intelligable even in it's reversed form, as it is on the record. ?! Anyone looking to hear this is advised to EQ it to make the voice more prominent against the music. On a lighter note, Windowlicker by Apex Twin has the fimiliar image of the maniacal artists' face if you view the spectrogram.
post78 Location: USA Posts: 2887	Posted - Sun Jun 08, 2003 6:49 pm  Quote: On a lighter note, Windowlicker by Apex Twin has the fimiliar image of the maniacal artists' face if you view the spectrogram. Wow! I'm a huge fan of Aphex (with an "h") Twin and never knew about that. I might have to check that one out. _________________ Answer = 1. Probably.
fm2030 Posts: 7	Posted - Mon Jun 09, 2003 1:46 am  post78 wrote: Aphex (with an "h") oops, typo (I lost the first post I did because I wasn't logged in, so was less careful even than usual). Actually, I haven't done the windowlicker thing for myself (need to get hold of a copy), but seen screenshots. Mp3 won't work, I imagine, for somewhat obvious reasons. It would have been done with metasynth, incidentally, there's a pc freeware prog that is similar (but much less sophisticated) called coagula light organ or similar. Also, Nine Inch Nails apparently put the words 'erase me' timestretched to the full length of the track on something-or-other (I'm not really familiar with their stuff). B****** got their first . I guess not surprising...
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