*MrDeath, I know IPA does not fare at all well in ASCII, but the gang over at the sci.lang newsgroup has gotten used to that by now. Faute de mieux, that’s the only way to do it in an online forum. You’re right that intervocalic /t/ in English is closer to a voiced flap than an unvoiced stop. I’ll allow for that from now on. Now then:
Another point about the t sound is that it often goes unpronounced. “Cotton”, for instance, will sound something like “knock” when reversed… Because most folks actually pronounce “cotton” as “caw’un” (approximating using English phonetics, since I don’t know IPA). If you don’t believe me, say it and keep track of what your tongue is doing. The tongue needs to touch the roof of the mouth to make a t sound.
Okay, I have something else to add to this. I’ve listened to the song “crazy train” by Ozzy Ozbourne and the ending is really bothering me. after it laughes, a high pitched voice says something like yaaaach, wohowoh. Is this actually supposed to mean anything, or is it just babble?
Okay, I have something else to add to this. I’ve listened to the song “crazy train” by Ozzy Ozbourne and the ending is really bothering me. after it laughes, a high pitched voice says something like yaaaach, wohowoh. Is this actually supposed to mean anything, or is it just babble?
There’s a bit at the end of “Free as a Bird” (from the Beatles Anthology 3 I think) that comes pretty close, although it’s far from perfect. And it’s entirely possible they recorded both bits seperately then reversed one copied it over the other part, so depending on which way you play it you hear the “forward” speech and your mind filters out the “backwards” part. This is buried at the end of the song; forwards it’s something like “turned out nice again didn’t it” and backwards it’s something like “made for John Lennon”. Again, not perfect, but this comes the closest of anything I’ve ever heard of making sense both backwards and forwards.
And of course I’ve always heard that the Beatles get credit for being the first to use backwards tracks on their records but I don’t know if it’s true or not. I know there’s a backwards guitar part on “Tomorrow Never Knows” (on Revolver, 1966) and there’s a brief bit of backwards lyrics at the end of “Rain” (b-side of “Paperback Writer”, also in 1966), but don’t know if that’s really the first time anybody ever did it or not.
But you can never have the experience of hearing this passage as a “virgin,” as it were. It sounds an awful lot like “turn me on dead man” to you because you were led in advance to believe that this is what it WOULD sound like. Absent this presuggestion, my point is that you never would have heard it this way.
BigStar303, I agree with you to a large extent, hearing it without the suggestion, you may not be inclined to hear it as English of any sort. My point was that somebody heard it that way as a virgin (the rumor had to start somewhere), and I don’t think it’s that great a stretch to hear “turn me on, dead man” in it. It’s got the vowel sounds pretty much right, the consonants not quite as close, but not that far out, either, and the rhythm is about right. I guess my point is that while backwards messages of this sort are completely unintentional, I don’t find it surprising at all that semi-intelligible English can be found in reverse speech (and some quite good examples); I guess I’m just trying to point out that this is an example of the interesting pattern-finding abilities of the human brain. Going back to my “seeing faces” analogy, for example, I think it’s undeniable that the original picture of the face on Mars looks like a face, our brains look for that sort of thing automatically; that of course doesn’t imply the face was built (or the backwards message was intentionally put there), nevertheless, the impression of a face (or intelligible speech) does exist. That’s all I’m trying to say.
I have a clear recollection of spinning a Buck Dharma album backwards, probably released around 1983, and hearing very clearly a ping pong game. Not only the rhytnmic pinging and ponging as the ball is hit back and forth, but the increasing drumming when a pp ball is trapped on the table under a paddle.
Coincidentally, the missus and I were discussing this very subject with the littluns while on a car trip over the weekend. Realized that unless I made a point of gathering them around my old turntable in the basement, they would never have this wonderful experience. Question, do I have to get them high for the full experience?
The Christian band Petra, on their song “Judas Kiss,” included deliberate backmasking that said, “What are you looking for the Devil for, when you ought to be looking for the Lord?”
Regarding the poster who said that you probably wouldn’t hear it if you weren’t expecting to:
I was in an extremely laid-back science class when some students I considered highly credulous cracked open a copy of “Stairway to Heaven” to play backward on a borrowed player from the school library. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to hear, and strongly suspected it would be nothing but the song backward. I was pretty startled to hear “garble garble garble garble Here’s to my Lord Satan garble garble His power is Satan garble.” Deliberate attempt to influence the Youth of America to devil worship? Some bored sound engineer’s joke? Coincidence? I don’t know, but it was clear enough for me to recognize even when I wasn’t really planning to hear anything.
You guys left out all reference to Judas Priest, the only band I know of that has actually been sued over this issue. Someone claimed that they put backwards messages in their music and it subliminally influenced some kids to do bad things. The judge ruled along the lines of what Cabbage was saying in his first post, thank goodness.
These two examples are difficult to compare; the Queen “marijuana” thing is a coincidence of phonetics, and the Prince example is a result of him saying his message forwards, then he reversed it and added it to the track.
Okay, okay… I’ve finally caved in. Those two books I mentioned (“Big Secrets” and “Bigger Secrets” by William Poundstone)? Here’s the link to 'em. Looks like there’s a third book in the series called --you guessed it-- “Biggest Secrets.” You should find all the backwards record info you could shake a stick at in these books, plus tons of other stuff that’s sure to interest dopers.
I believe that Snopes.com uses these books as reference sometimes.
If you WANTED to have backmasking, you would have to go through an awful lot of phrases to find some that worked ‘forward’ (backward from spinning the original (released) version backward - whew!) and even more to get one to make sense that way AND fit into your song.
But it all be for naught, because you do not pick up something subliminally by hearing it backward!
And even then you would probably have to ‘fudge’ words, a la ‘Louie Louie’ to fit them in.
I had a friend who swore the background vocals in ‘Snoopy vs the Red Baron’ were ‘Fuk you, Fuk You’ instead of ‘Hup Two, Hup Two’. It does sound a lot like that. You hear what you want to hear…
Regarding the JUDAS PRIEST issue. The lawsuit was a very serious and dangerous time for free speech. The specific song in question was called Beyond the Realms of Death and at the end of the song, the lawsuit alleged that when played backwards, the words “Beyond the Realms of Death” actually said “I took my life”. They also tried to prove that in the song Better by you, Better by Me there was a backmasked message of “Do it, do it”.
The album is called Stained Class and under all the bullsh*t, this is actually an excellent album.
Cisco, IPA stands for International Phonetic Alphabet. It’s the commonly accepted way to transcribe speech sounds objectively without privileging any particular language. You need it to analyze the phonemes of English to lay bare the exact sounds in the words apart from the irregularities of our spelling. IPA is based on the Roman alphabet, but uses various special characters for all the different sounds. There are many more sounds in English than letters of the alphabet. So online linguists have to adapt it to ASCII using the capital/lowercase distinction the best they can. Here’s the ASCII IPA FAQ.
Pezwookie, there’s an easy way to avoid the scrollbar-off-the-side-of-the-screen problem. You can make any text into a hyperlink (preferably a short text). Use the vB code: